Falling Girl
Scott Snibbe and Annie Loui
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive

June 2, 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Reception, Exhibition Opening, and Musical Performance
Join us in the Museum Theater Gallery and adjacent Garden to celebrate the opening of Scott Snibbe: Falling Girl and to close the first day of the Berkeley Big Bang symposium. Feed your body with light refreshments and move your body to the music of DJ Kid Kameleon. Open to the public.

Falling Girl presents a story in which a young girl falls from a skyscraper. During her miraculously slow descent, the girl interacts with the people in each window. These silhouettes react to the falling girl with varying degrees of engagement or indifference as they go about their activities, each vignette a mini-drama within the story. The daylight fades, night falls and passes, and at dawn, when the falling girl finally lands on the sidewalk, she is an aged woman who bears no resemblance to the young girl who started her fall a few minutes before.

Visitors to the museum are invited to interact with the falling girl as well. A camera captures the silhouettes of viewers on the far wall opposite the projected image and inserts them into the narrative. Visitors may appear in the windows minutes later alongside the prerecorded performers and become part of the story. This subtle form of interactivity is unusual. Many interactive artworks allow the viewer to control the narrative like the protagonist in a video game. Falling Girl displaces this expectation in favor of ephemeral interaction that reinforces the work’s allegory of transience and unexpected encounters.

In this collaborative artwork, choreographer/director Annie Loui cast and directed the dance and movement performances while Scott Snibbe created the projected image and computer programming, and with his studio staff generated the interactive elements and physical installation.