Embracing the Machine at Ringling Museum

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Pictured: Artist Toni Dove squares off with "The Dress That Eats Souls." Photo by Phil Lederer.

Within the bowels of the Searing Wing of the Ringling Museum, in a dimly lit room where the unseen ceiling stretches into infinity, the great machine stirs. Looking something like Skynet meets Mystery Science Theater by way of David Lynch, The Dress That Eats Souls unfolds its arms and announces its presence, beckoning its audience to come closer, to step into the shaft of light that streams from the ceiling and enter into this biomechanical communion, to embrace oblivion. “I just woke her up,” says Toni Dove, the thing’s creator and the artist celebrated in Ringling Museum’s latest retrospective exhibition, Toni Dove: Embodied Machines. She approaches and begins to dance. The soul-eating dress responds.

Writer. Director. Sculptor. Builder. Filmmaker. Inventor. Artist. Any and all apply in equal measure to Dove, whose “interactive cinema” and robotic creations have continually placed her at the forefront of the multimedia field exploring the intersection of humanity and technology, and the evolving means of expression and experience this continual intertwining entails. In this latest interactive installation, The Dress That Eats Souls, which enjoys its world premiere at Ringling Museum, Dove pulls out all the stops for a towering creation that moves with the audience, speaks with the audience and invites them inside to tell them stories of all who came before.

Engaging with the installation may seem daunting at first, but a little effort and an open mind go a long way. Entering the designated area one at a time, participants are first led through a brief calibration period, syncing the "dress" to their general body movements and the display on the panoramic screen to smaller nods of the head. Thus, using themselves as instruments, participants navigate through a complex web of time-traveling and thematically connected stories, each filmed from multiple perspectives and with accompanying narration. Breathtaking and bizarre yet intimate and emotional, no two journeys are exactly the same, as no two instruments will be exactly the same. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will have multiple opportunities to become participants.

Dove’s mind-bending and eye-popping installations began with Artificial Changelings, an interactive movie released in 1998. “That was the moment when technology started catching up with Toni’s vision,” says Matthew McLendon, the former Ringling Museum curator who began organizing the exhibition four years ago and returned to see the job completed, working with current Ringling Museum Curator Chris Jones. In this first retrospective of Dove’s work, audiences can interact with Artificial Changelings, and view artifacts—sketches, maquettes, costumes, video on iPads positioned throughout the exhibition—from its creation, as well as similar objects from the creation of two of her later live performance projects—Spectropia and Lucid Possession—which will both be produced by the museum during the exhibition's run.

As Dove’s work evolves, traditional storytelling meets post-modern narrative entanglement as traditional installation meets the vanguard of interactive robotics and programming, bringing the audience into the experience and breaking down that last traditional barrier. “She really represents a 21st century globalized workshop,” says McLendon, comparing Dove’s constant collaborations and multi-disciplinary tendencies to the workshops of old masters like Rubens, which the museum already famously celebrates. “It’s an exhibition unlike any other that you’ve experienced before.”

Opening this Sunday, Toni Dove: Embodied Machines runs through May 20. In addition to the exhibition, Ringling Museum will stage a production of Spectropia in the Ringling Courtyard on March 9 and Lucid Possession in the Historic Asolo Theater on April 13 and 14.

Pictured: Artist Toni Dove squares off with "The Dress That Eats Souls." Photo by Phil Lederer.

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