Event
Synthetic Creatures. Storia, evoluzione e rappresentazione
Register for the eventSynthetic Creatures.
Starting February 5, 2026
Thursday through Sunday – 3:00 PM / 7:00 PM
MEET Digital Culture Center
Viale Vittorio Veneto 2, Milan
THE BODY AS CODE
Since 1974, Rebecca Allen has posed a question that spans fifty years of research: where does the body fit in when we inhabit virtual worlds? Her practice has transformed the digital realm from an abstract territory into a space where corporeality becomes language, presence, and political inquiry.
A winner of numerous awards, Allen is among the very few women who worked in computer animation in the 1970s, when digital art was synonymous with geometric calculations and abstraction. Introducing the body into that space and representing it through synthetic figures in art conveys a radical message: the assertion that technology is not neutral, that the digital realm requires a physical perspective.
This retrospective traces half a century of pioneering research: from the first images on punch cards to 3D animations and virtual reality installations, including collaborations with Kraftwerk, Twyla Tharp, and Nam June Paik.
THE PIONEER
Rebecca Allen began working with computers in 1974, when the technology was limited to generating wireframe images. Girl Lifts Skirt (1974), her first digital animation, was created from preparatory drawings translated into coordinates via punch cards. It is a loop in which a female figure lifts her skirt in a gesture that is both playful and provocative. The work comments on the absence of a female perspective in the development of digital technologies.
In 1981, at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of the New York Institute of Technology, Allen created Swimmer, one of the first three-dimensional animations of a moving human body. The very first 3D model of a female body had been created by Ed Catmull – future co-founder of Pixar – but remained static. Allen brought it to life by studying the fluid movements of underwater swimming. The result tackles one of the most complex technical problems of the era: simulating organic movement in digital space. Swimmer is thus a layered metaphor. The female body in the virtual abyss is the artist immersing herself in the void of the black screen, populating with human presence a territory considered cold and emotionally inert.
MOVEMENT AS THOUGHT
The 1980s saw Allen collaborate with key figures in contemporary culture. In 1982, she created the digital character of St. Catherine for the dance film The Catherine Wheel by choreographer Twyla Tharp. It was the first time a computer generated figure was presented on television. In 1986, she created the iconic video Musique Non-Stop for Kraftwerk, exploring facial expression and digital speech at a time when these were unexplored technological frontiers.
These collaborations brought computer animation out of research labs and into popular culture via MTV, building a bridge between technical experimentation and the collective imagination.
The focus remains on movement. For Allen, animating a body is not a technical exercise but an exploration of what humanity expresses through gesture, of how nonverbal communication reveals dimensions that language cannot capture.
INTERACTIVITY AND ARTIFICIAL LIFE
In the early 1990s, Allen was among the first artists to explore video game technologies for interactive art. With the UCLA research team, she developed Emergence, a software system that became the foundation for creating The Bush Soul (1997), a series of interactive installations in which visitors, through avatars, navigate virtual worlds alive with digital life forms governed by emotions and energies.
The title refers to a West African belief that a person can possess multiple souls. The avatars become extensions of identity, multiplications of the self that inhabit both physical and digital realities simultaneously.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION
“As we spend more and more time in virtual worlds, what happens to the body? Where does the body fit within technology?”
This question runs through Allen’s entire practice and finds explicit expression in her more recent virtual reality works. Inside (2016) and The Tangle of Mind and Matter (2017) use VR headsets to explore the relationship between the virtual mind and the physical body. In the VR work, Life Without Matter (2018), Allen creates experiences of radical embodiment: the visitor stands before a digital mirror where their avatar takes on different forms.
Thanks to visuomotor correlation, within seconds one becomes accustomed to those bodies, recognizing them as one’s own. Then suddenly the movements become desynchronized, generating profound discomfort – the unsettling sensation that the reflection is alive and other-than-us.
These works interrogate the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, exploring how technology redefines perception, consciousness, and identity.
THE RETROSPECTIVE
The exhibition presents a chronological journey through fifty years of research, from early animations to virtual reality experiments, including recent works created using artificial intelligence, and offering a comprehensive overview of her most significant works, created specifically for MEET’s Immersive Room.
The project documents the evolution of the relationship between body and technology: how the digital representation of human movement has shifted from basic lines to complex simulations, how interactivity has transformed the viewer into a participant, and how virtuality has redefined the boundaries between physical and digital presence.
Allen has worked at the intersection of the art studio and the research laboratory. She taught for over thirty years at UCLA (1986–2019), holding positions including Founding Chair of the Department of Design Media Arts and Founding Co-Director of the UCLA Center for the Digital Arts.
BODY, GENDER, TECHNOLOGY
Allen’s persistent choice to represent female bodies in the digital realm constitutes a political stance. Introducing sensuality, vulnerability, and fluidity into a medium perceived as cold and rational means challenging the ideology of technology as a male-dominated, neutral, and disembodied domain.
Girl Lifts Skirt (1974) addresses sexism in the fields of art and technology. Swimmer (1981) brings movements considered feminine into the virtual realm at a time when motion simulation was the domain of engineering research. Recent VR installations explore gender identity as a fluid construct, an experience that is renegotiated through the embodiment of different bodies.
This approach has laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of digital artists.
THE LEGACY
Rebecca Allen has helped define what digital art can be, what questions it can ask, and what territory it can explore. She has demonstrated that computers are not tools for geometric abstractions but mediums for investigating physical experience, and that the virtual realm is a space where identity and presence can be redefined.
Her work anticipates issues that are central today: avatars in metaverses, fluid online identity, the gamification of experience, and artificial intelligence applied to animation. Every time a virtual body moves believably, we are building upon foundations laid by artists like Allen.
This retrospective captures the complexity of a body of work that has spanned five decades without ever ceasing to question the relationship between the body and technology.
