Biography

Douglas Back has been working with computers since 1979. He has shown his work in many places in Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Mexico. He teaches in the New Media and Sculpture/Installation Departments at The Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He has built machines that allow arm wrestling and teleport weather over the telephone lines. Robotic simulations of the inner ear, computer controlled shadow projections, and computer controlled chairs which heat up or cool down depending on the emotional content of video recordings.

Quotes

Douglas Back
The transformation of memory to the desired form

"Humans have devoted a lot of evolutionary bandwidth to language. Our manipulation of memory is directed by language. Language was the first virtual reality. It occurred when we broke the names of things away from the objects themselves and set them free to float around in a separate world. Where you could combine them in surreal, abstract, unnatural expressions. This type of memory transformation has to do with a kind of morphing or overlay. A cut and paste memory transformation allows us to catalog and impose order even where none exists. Cut and paste manipulation is systematic and serial. These two techniques define the two educated cultures in my society, science and arts. [...] My latest theory is that artists have some kind of partial link to that part of the brain which has no language. This part wishes to communicate, but most communication channels are wired for words. To complete the communications circuit the illiterate brain must direct the artist to fabricate some sort of model in the real world. The communication comes out through the hands and once it is in front of us we understand ... a little more."