Adrianne Wortzel

Adrianne Wortzel (born 1941)^[1] is an American contemporary artist who uses robotics and interaction between humans and machines in her installations and performances. She has also created many online works of photography as well as electronic literature.

Early life and education

Wortzel was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941.^[2][3] She attended Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where she studied painting and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts in 1963. She later continued her education at The School of Visual Arts in New York and received her Master of Fine Arts in Computer Arts in 1996.^[3]

Career

Wortzel has taught at many art educational institutions, including the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Cooper Union.^[4] As of 2025, she is a professor emerita in the Departments of Entertainment Technology and Emerging Media Technologies at the New York City College of Technology, after teaching there as a professor from 1998 to 2015.^[3][5][6] In 2000, she founded StudioBlueLab,(first called the Robotic Renaissance Project and initially funded by the National Science Foundation).^[7][1][8]

Much of Wortzel's early career was as an abstract painter,^[9] and was featured in many group and solo exhibitions in several New York galleries, as well as in solo exhibitions at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Connecticut. When she returned to school, she began working more with robotics and telerobotics as she pursued her MFA in Computer Art, producing video and installation work, both in galleries and online.

Wortzel has earned several grants and awards in the course of her work, including the National Science Foundation Award for the Robotic Renaissance Project. She has also had her work featured in many art publications, including Margret Lovejoy's Digital Current: Art in the Electronic Age^[10] and Frank Popper's From Technological to Virtual Art,^[11] and has been published in major art journals, including Leonardo in 2007.^[12] Wortzel was an Eyebeam Resident in 2008.^[13][14]

Installations

Her 2001 installation Camouflage Town was shown in the group exhibition Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a robot named Kiru was allowed to inhabit the space of the museum and interact with museum visitors both directly and remotely.^[2] Another work by Wortzel, Eliza Redux, was launched on the Whitney Museum's website in 2005.^[15] The installation took Joseph Weizenbaum's artificial intelligence program ELIZA program and embodied it in a physical robot's form installed in Wortzel's East Village apartment in New York. Participants interacted with the robot through online sessions.^[16] The Holden Luntz Gallery has an on-line exhibition of her work.^[17] Other installations included:

• NoMad is an Island, installation, Linz, Austria, 1997
• Kiku, 2001 is a networked robot installation with a website, computers, and video camera, where the viewer interacts with a robot.^[18]
• Battle of the Pyramids, installation, Eyebeam Atelier, 2008 uses 21 toys as a miniature battalion. Elmo becomes a soldier.^[18]
• Camouflage Town, installation, The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010
• The Veils of Transference, video, 2010
• Solace and Perpetuity is a book project based on Wortzel's 1994 The Electronic Chronicles.^[18]

Electronic literature works

• The Electronic Chronicles, in Riding the Meridian, 1997 (restored in 2019).^[19] N. Katherine Hayles describes this work as an open work that uses the metaphor of fort-da game to infuse novel semantic strategies into hypertext linking.^[20] This work was part of Wortzel's MFA in computer art in 1995.^[21]
• Eliza Redux, installation, New York City College of Technology, 2008. Wortzel revisioned the 1960's program ELIZA to include graphics, robotics, and expanding vocabulary.^[22]
• Solace and Perpetuity, algorithmically derived fictionalized autobiography, 2016

External links

• Adrianne Wortzel's website
• Documentation of Eliza Redux