Don Ritter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the Lehigh University metallurgy professor and US Congressman from Pennsylvania, see Donald L. Ritter.
Don Ritter (born 1959) is a Canadian installation artist and writer living in Berlin, Germany. He has received international recognition because of the technical innovation and social relevance of his artworks. Ritter is considered a pioneer of interactive video-sound installations. Since 1986 his works have been exhibited throughout Europe, North America and Asia, including SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, Metrònom in Barcelona, Ars Electronica in Linz, Sonambiente Sound Festival in Berlin, New Music America in New York, and ArtFuture 2000 in Taipei. Ritter’s most widely exhibited work is "Intersection," an interactive sound installation created in 1993. The work presents the sounds of 4 lanes of car traffic in a large dark room which respond to the audience by screeching to a halt, idling, accelerating or crashing into each other. "Intersection" has been exhibited in 7 countries. Ritter’s most recent work is “Vox Populi” (2005), an interactive installation where audience members become leaders by reading political speeches to a 45 ft. video projection of a cheering crowd.
Between 1988 and 1990, Ritter collaborated with interactive music pioneer George Lewis (trombonist) to create a series of live performances that featured large projections of interactive video controlled by Lewis's improvised trombone playing. Their first performance was presented in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.These performances used a software developed by Ritter called Orpheus that enabled real time video to be controlled by any musical instrument.[1]
Ritter was born in Camrose, Alberta, Canada. He studied psychology and fine arts at the University of Waterloo, electronics engineering at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, cinema at Harvard University, and visual studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked as a telecommunications designer for Northern Telecom and Bell-Northern Research,and as a professor of art at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec and at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. [2]
