Don Rit­ter is a Cana­dian artist and writer liv­ing in Berlin. His work refers to the so­cial func­tion of media and its re­la­tion­ship with hege­mony, ser­vil­ity, and com­modi­ti­za­tion. Within his in­ter­ac­tive in­stal­la­tions, au­di­ences par­tic­i­pate in so­cial por­traits that are de­ter­mined through phys­i­cal body ac­tiv­ity and voice. Rit­ter’s work has fo­cused on per­for­mances of in­ter­ac­tive video con­trolled by live, im­pro­vised music. His writ­ings are pri­mar­ily con­cerned with media lit­er­acy, ethics, and aes­thet­ics. Rit­ter’s video-sound in­stal­la­tions and per­for­mances have been ex­hib­ited at fes­ti­vals and mu­se­ums through­out Eu­rope, North Amer­ica and Asia, in­clud­ing SITE Santa Fe (USA), Win­ter Olympics 2010 Cul­tural Olympiad (Van­cou­ver), Metrònom (Barcelona), Son­am­bi­ente Sound Fes­ti­val (Berlin), Exit Fes­ti­val (Paris), and New Music Amer­ica (New York City). Rit­ter has de­grees in Elec­tron­ics En­gi­neer­ing Tech­nol­ogy (North­ern Al­berta In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy), Fine Arts and Psy­chol­ogy (Uni­ver­sity of Wa­ter­loo), and a Mas­ters in Vi­sual Stud­ies (Mass­a­chu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy/Cen­ter for Ad­vanced Vi­sual Stud­ies). He has held full-time pro­fes­sor­ships in art and de­sign at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­sity (Montréal) and at Pratt In­sti­tute (New York City). His work has re­ceived sup­port and recog­ni­tion from the Canada Coun­cil, The Banff Cen­tre (Canada), Pratt In­sti­tute (USA), ZKM (Ger­many), Ars Elec­tron­ica (Aus­tria), DGArtes (Por­tu­gal),the Goethe In­sti­tute (Ger­many), and the Eu­ro­pean Union Cul­ture Pro­gramme.

ISEA1992 (TISEA)

Don Ritter is a Canadian artist and writer who has worked internationally in media art since 1988. His works are primarily interactive video performances and installations controlled by live music or body gestures. Ritter’s work uses Orpheus, an intelligent software that provides a rule-based structure for controlling video through music or sensors. Ritter began writing Orpheus during his graduate studies at MIT. Since then, he has presented interactive video-music performances at festivals, galleries and museums, including New Music America 89 (NYC), Art Institute of Chicago, The Verona Jazz Festival (Italy), MIT Media Lab (Boston), STEIM (Amsterdam), A Space (Toronto) and The Kitchen (NYC). During these performances, Ritter collaborated mostly with musicians George E. Lewis, Thomas Dimuzio and Trevor Tureski. Ritter completed his graduate degree in visual studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT Media Lab and Harvard University’s film department. He has undergraduate degrees in fine arts and psychology from the University of Waterloo and a diploma in electronics engineering from NAIT. Since 1989, Ritter has been a full-time assistant professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal.