JoAnn Gillerman

Jo Ann Gillerman in live performance of Whispers in a Plane of Light, on a Sandin video image processor/synthesizer at Digicon '83, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1983.

JoAnn Gillerman (born 1950) is an American multimedia artist and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is known for interdisciplinary, often interactive and immersive, works merging art, science, culture and technology. Gillerman emerged in the 1970s as an early new media artist, creating experimental combinations of video, collaborative live performance and installation. Art historian Liz Kotz wrote, "Gillerman pioneered the use of computer graphics and synthetically-generated imagery in video art … us[ing] the technology of computer-generated and re-processed images combined with electronic and acoustic music to develop different ways of making abstract visual designs."

Gillerman's art, videos and exhibitions have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as well as on PBS. She lives in Emeryville, California and is a professor at the California College of the Arts.

Early life and career Gillerman was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1950. She studied art at Duke University (BA, 1972), specializing in medical and botanical illustration; at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) she earned an MFA in 1975 in painting, drawing and video art, a new realm at the time.

During this period, Gillerman founded Viper Optics (In 1976), a video and computer graphics company, with her brother, musician James Gillerman, and artist Jim Whiteaker. She has consistently employed technological, experimental, collaborative and interactive elements in conjunction with sensual and humanistic themes and imagery that soften her more hard-edged media.

Total solar eclipse and lava flow works Twelve years after first witnessing and filming a total solar eclipse Gillerman began a new phase in her work, recording and reworking macrocosmic primal events around the world. In July 1991 she traveled with collaborator Rob Terry to the Island of Hawaii to record a spectacular confluence of natural events: a total solar eclipse coinciding with the eruption of an active volcano, Kilauea. It consisted of a semi- or full circular ring of 10–24 monitors and audio speakers, placed within a multi-user system of floor sensors that enabled viewers to reconfigure images, multilingual, indigenous stories and sounds, and fragments of the event without using a mouse or keyboard. AnArchy pARTyCAM (1993–5) was an interactive performance that recast participants as both display and object of interest using two cyberarts costumes, one with a camera and the other with the capacity to project the camera's display. Shadow Dance (2001–09) was a floor-pad controlled, multi-channel, multi-user exhibit at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland that extended Gillerman's work on eclipses. Using floor sensors embellished by backlit images of sun, moon and earth, participants could create individual mixes of aural (scientific, personal and indigenous mythical accounts) and visual imagery of eclipses on two rows of six flat-screen monitors. Chimp Finder (2005–08) was an outdoor exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo that enabled participants to locate and identify live chimpanzees and find out about their backstories and relationships; the first of its kind, it combined a custom-designed scope, computer-aided biometrics and a touch screen display with information menus.

Recognition Gillerman has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, Rocky Mountain Regional Artist Fellowship and Cultural Arts Department of the City of Oakland.

Gillerman's work belongs to the public art collections of the Chabot Space and Science Center, Computer History Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, SFMOMA, St. Louis Zoo, The Tech Museum of Innovation, Video Free America and Whitney Museum, among others.