Microscope is very pleased to present a screening of works by New York-based artist Nina Sobell featuring a selection of videos spanning more than 50 years, from 1971 – shot with a Sony Portapak — to her present-day inquiries using social media platforms and AI. Through her very uniquely empathic lens, she has proposed a type of art based on human interactions through physical installations as well as through other forms of communication mediated by new tools and machines. Sobell will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening. The event is taking place in-person as well as online.

Nina Sobell took an early interest in the idea of interactivity, sculptural environments, performance, video, as well as other electronic and early web technologies. From her experimentations with foam rubber sculptures and environments circa 1967 — as well as ephemeral sculptures made of dead leaves or grass — the search for audience participation in Sobell’s public installations of that time led her to embrace the medium of video, not only as a way to document those interactions, but also to prolong and extend such outdoor experiences into indoor spaces via CCTV cameras and monitors.

Subsequent works using TV monitors, telephones, and eventually the addition of the connective possibilities of the world wide web — such as her collaboration with Emily Hartzell VirtuAlice from 1995, which consisted of a wireless tele-robotic webcam on a motorized chair that took sequential images that were shared in real time and was able to be controlled remotely by users on the web or passerby — emphasized the elements of live play and performance, blurring the boundaries between audience and artist, personal and public, real and virtual.

The evening begins with a 1993 documentary by Hartzell, “Pioneer in Interactivity” that discusses the artist’s works through actual footage including of such groundbreaking pieces as BrainWave Drawings, initiated in 1972, in which the viewers’ brain activity is captured through electroencephalographic electrodes and reproduced on a TV screen, an “electronic theater” where participants are both actors and observers.

The program continues with early videos such as “Hair Comb” and “Elements,” from 1973, which are testaments to the independence offered by the medium, presenting performances and stagings of sculptures for the camera while investigating the visual possibilities of black & white video. Other works including “BrainWave Drawings (1973-1983)” involves documentations of multiple iterations of a participatory installation, while “Breaking Glass” (1973) is edited from footage of an extreme performance for the camera. “Murder with Mother” (1982), “Into the pot you go” (1982) and others, find the artist revisiting personal trauma’s through allegorical and more theatrical restagings. Later works, consider the brain and its functions — both conscious and unconscious — and more recently involve AI-generated imagery based on the prompt “Humans evolving into animals.”

General Admission $10 Member Admission $8 Online tickets will be available on this page at 6:30pm ET on the day of the event.

Since 1969, New York-based artist and sculptor Nina Sobell has been active internationally in pioneering internet performance art actions, in addition to working with videos exploring neuroscience, computers, memory, human relationships, communication, public interactivity and sculpture. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the NEA and NYSCA for her pioneering video performance art. Sobell taught at UCLA and SVA, was a visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was artist-in residence at the Center for Advanced Technology, Courant School of Computer Science and ITP Tisch at New York University as well as Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. She received a BFA sculpture and printmaking from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and an MFA in sculpture from Cornell University.

Her sculptures, installations, and video art have been widely screened and exhibited internationally at such places as MIT, Getty Museum and Research Institute, Blanton Museum of Art and Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Her work is in the collections of the Getty Museum; de Saisset Museum; Banff Centre for the Arts; Manchester Gallery, England; Acme Gallery Archives in Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Blanton Museum, Austin; CAM, Houston; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, La Biennale di Venezia; ICA London; DIA Foundation; Cornell University and many other institutions; the Kramlich, Reynolds, RJFleck, Broder, Leo Kuelbs Foundation and other private collections. Video Data Bank and MLC Gallery represent her work.