Don Ritter
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Don Ritter (born 1959) is a Canadian installation artist and writer living in Berlin, Germany. He is considered a pioneer of interactive video-sound installations and performances. 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(1993) an interactive sound installation presented in a large dark room. The work presents the sounds of 4 lanes of car traffic that respond to audiences by screeching to a halt, idling, accelerating or crashing into each other. Intersection has been exhibited in throughout North America, Europe and Asia, and experienced by over 600,000 people.[1] Ritter’s most recent work is Vox Populi(2005), an interactive installation that enables audience members to become leaders by reading political speeches to a large 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 Orpheus, a software developed by Ritter that enables real time video to be controlled by any musical instrument.[2]
Ritter has a Master of Science in Visual Studies(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and undergraduate degrees in Fine Arts, Psychology(University of Waterloo), and Electronics Engineering Technology(Northern Alberta Institute of Technology). He has been a telecommunications designer for Northern Telecom and Bell-Northern Research, a professor of fine arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, and professor of art and design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. [3]
