Vibeke Sorensen

Vibeke Sorensen is a Danish artist, composer, and educator whose work has played an important role in digital multimedia, computer animation, visual music, and interactive installation. She studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Art and Architecture in Copenhagen before earning a master’s degree in electronic art from the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Beginning in the 1970s, she worked with computer graphics and video synthesis while teaching and developing media art programs in the United States and later in Singapore. She founded the Computer Animation Laboratory at the California Institute of the Arts and later established the Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the University of Southern California. From 2009 to 2021, she served as Professor and Chair of the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Throughout her career, she collaborated with scientists and engineers at institutions including the California Institute of Technology, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Princeton University. 

Beginning in the 1970s, Sorensen worked with analogue video synthesizers, computer graphics, and electronic music to develop what she described as “visual music,” using animation and sound to shape rhythm, movement, and perception. Early works such as VideOcean, Concurrents, and NLoops transformed abstract imagery, projected light, and electronically generated sound into immersive visual environments. Created during a period when artists were only beginning to experiment with computer based media, these works explored how digital technologies could structure visual experience in ways similar to music. Sorensen used movement, color, light, and sound to create spatial environments that responded to viewer interaction and live streams of data. As her practice expanded, she created large scale installations and projected environments in which light, sound, and animation changed through audience interaction and live data. Her projects often draw from music, textile traditions, cosmology, calendars, and environmental systems associated with Southeast Asia and Bali. Works including Illuminations, Mayur, Mood of the Planet, Tree Dress, and The Balinese Calendar and the Colour Music of Time examine how cultural knowledge, ecological systems, and digital technologies can be translated into immersive visual and sonic experiences. 

Sorensen became closely associated with ACM SIGGRAPH as both an exhibiting artist and organizer, later serving as Chair of the 2007 Art Gallery Global Eyes. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions and research projects exploring visual music, immersive media, environmental systems, and digital culture, including presentations at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the Barrett Gallery at Santa Monica College, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition Digital Witness. She received grants and research support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Intel Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which awarded her a fellowship in Film, Video, and Multimedia in 2001.