Flashy Objects: Rebecca Allen Revisits Girl Lifts Skirt

Rebecca Allen’s engagement with technology began when she was an art student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the early 1970s. Convinced that computers would catalyze a new industrial age, a computer age, she secured access to a lab with cutting-edge resources and a mainframe machine. In collaboration with computer scientists at Brown University, she created Girl Lifts Skirt, one of the earliest digital animations of a female body. In this work—now part of MoMA’s collection—Allen subverts the gaze through which female sensuality had traditionally been conveyed all while questioning the gendered division of labor in the animation industry. Her use of a new technology challenged the very materiality of art itself—a digitally crafted artwork didn’t follow the standards of the arts curriculum. Yet the themes present in this work—the exploration of motion aesthetics, women’s role in technology, and a humanistic approach to new media—would continue to reverberate throughout her expansive career. A trailblazing figure in media arts, Allen authored some of the first three-dimensional representations of human figures in motion. Her iconic digital mannequins for Kraftwerk are a testament to her work’s intricate connection between technology and the body. Allen has seamlessly navigated the liminal space between the research lab and the artist studio, proposing new interfaces to redefine our interactions with the digital realm.

The preparatory drawings for Girl Lifts Skirt and a contemporary reconstruction of the undocumented original animation are currently on view at MoMA in the collection gallery Body Constructs. In the months leading up to the exhibition, the artist shared insights into her creative process, influences, and her vision of technology after half a century in the field—revealing how she continues to use the digital realm to explore the very edges of reality itself.
—Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design

Rebecca Allen. Girl Lifts Skirt. 1974. Still from digital animation

I’m an artist who’s been working with new technology for about 50 years now, amazingly, starting from 1974 when I did my first work, Girl Lifts Skirt. My inspiration early on was my strong interest in art movements of the machine age, like the Bauhaus and Constructivists and Futurists, who were looking at tools of technology to use in a new type of creation of art, but also to reflect on how these machines may affect society.

When I was a student in the early ’70s at Rhode Island School of Design, I had been working with static forms of art. I worked with sculpture, wood primarily, illustration, drawing, but I wanted to move into time-based work, to think particularly about motion. My strongest interest was in studying human motion, studying nonverbal communication, how our slightest movements or gestures can affect our expression and convey so much. I was particularly interested in the female body. I thought, “What will be the new thing?” And that’s when I made a decision to work with a computer, both to think about our future, our humanity, how technology affects it, but also to think about the new art tools that come out of this technology, because what I wanted to do was to create a new art form.

When I was at RISD, I was also fortunate to discover that next door to us Brown University was doing some of the earliest work in computer graphics and animation, and this led me to find the professors working on that and ask if I could work with them on the computer to create a new piece of art. At this time, I was also realizing that all fields—the art field, the tech field—really didn’t include the input of women, especially in terms of innovation and invention. I thought it was important as a woman to approach this scary new machine and actually be involved in the invention phase, just when they were inventing the software that could do any of this. There was no commercial software at that time. Of course, computers were in large rooms, very difficult to work with, so it was really different from working with other artistic tools.

I had to learn a bit about computer programming. I had to break things down into numbers and coordinates, into a kind of form the machine would understand. Entering the computer lab at Brown, the whole emerging tech field was very male at that time, and so I knew I was somewhat of a misfit, both as a woman and as an artist coming into these types of labs. But true to my personality, I just would ignore that and try to move forward with this work.

The traditional way to make animation, even to this day, is to make what are called “key frames,” key points of the movement, and then the “in-betweener” would create all the frames between those key movements, and then the frames would be outlined and colored in. I discovered, to my surprise, that women weren’t allowed to be animators in the animation industry. The way the industry worked is that a man would animate the key frames—those were the important parts—then women would create the in-between frames. They’d outline and color and do all of the labor involved in animation. I thought, “I’m the animator on this.” I knew that you could use the computer to create a key frame and it could create some kind of sequence of in-between frames, so that’s what I wanted to explore. That way the computer became my in-betweener and outliner.

I was 20 years old when I started Girl Lifts Skirt, just out of being a teenager and really realizing the extreme limitations that women had, both in their careers and their acceptance into any field, the art world or the tech world. Metaphorically, I wanted to insert the female presence in the computer and the human body. I should say too, because so much of the earliest work in computer art, any kind of computer graphics, was involving geometrical shapes, mathematically formed shapes, so it was important to me to break that and to actually put the body, the female, in, to address topics like the objectification and sexualization of women in a medium that in no way seemed to relate to that kind of thinking.

Rebecca Allen still keeps a physical submission folder from Brown University, where she stored her early sketches

Rebecca Allen. Girl Lifts Skirt (preparatory sketches). 1974. Ink on vellum

From the very beginning, I just had this intuitive sense that technology really needed to be affected by humanity. I was worried that because technology was such a scientific and mathematical and very male dominant field, that we may forget the human aspects, the ethical aspects, how to humanize technology instead of having the technology turn us into machines. I did always feel that I was infiltrating these worlds as an artist and a woman, and very determined to try to affect what was developing at that time.

In the drawings for Girl Lifts Skirt, I use color. As an artist I was familiar with color, but in a technical, constructive kind of way. What I had to do is figure out key points in the movement, and that’s what the drawings are showing. Thinking about where one form leads to another, it’s not a three-dimensional form itself, it’s not a puppet, so when it translates from one key position to another, it’s doing it in a two-dimensional way, which has its certain artifacts and quality.

I love these drawings because, to me, they show both art and technology together, but they were also diagrams for what I needed to dissect these movements, and then think about what was happening as one line would move to another position and then to another position, and I had to break down the form into lines that would then move as a group of points. So I used color to keep track of the lines and how the lines full of points would move from one position to another.

Rebecca Allen. Girl Lifts Skirt (preparatory sketch). 1974. Pencil and ink on graph paper

First I had to get positions of each point, so I started with graph paper, and I would draw the figure and break it into individual points on the graph paper. The next step was how to group these into specific lines that would move as a group from one position to another as a line. Both the grid paper and the vellum show a two part process of my thinking and how to dissect this movement. The final [stage] was the tedious process of typing in numbers onto paper punch cards, and then you insert the punch cards in the computer, run the program and eventually see the result on the screen. I remember that was such a miraculous moment: Can all of these numbers I punched in actually make this sensual movement? And I was really excited to see that. Though I have to say, at the lab, when it first came up on the screen, I think the computer scientists around me were a bit baffled by the results.

It’s funny how after thinking about the future of art and technology for decades now, more recently—maybe it’s with my age—I’m less interested in what will be the newest thing. I feel like technology is moving too fast for our human understanding. We need to spend more time looking deeper at these technologies instead of only looking for the new shiny, flashy tool that we want to use. As humans, we haven’t figured out how reality works yet. We don’t understand it. We don’t know how our human consciousness works. Even though we’re quickly defining, discovering virtual realities, we haven’t figured out reality yet.

As told to Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Rebecca Allen’s Girl Lifts Skirt is currently on view in Gallery 417: Body Constructs.