Claudia Hart
Painting, simulation and performance. Research resident at The IMC Lab + Gallery, 2013. Explore The Alices (Walking).
The Alices (Walking)
An opera, a fashion show and an augmented reality performance. Created by Claudia Hart with composer Edmund Campion, The Alices (Walking) turns Lewis Carroll’s story into a live encounter between bodies, patterns, language and machines.
Performance film by Artur Ratton, filmed at Eyebeam on March 8, 2014, during Moving Image Art Fair. Music and soundtrack: Edmund Campion. Watch the full film on Vimeo.
Performance and film credits
Created and directed by Claudia Hart in collaboration with Edmund Campion. Costumes: Claudia Hart with Julie Robinson. Performers: Claudia Hart, Joon Lee, Adrian Saich, Julie Robinson and Nayland Blake.
Performance producers: Eyebeam, Moving Image Art Fair, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley. Film director and editor: Artur Ratton. Cameras: Artur Ratton, Rui Hu and Lilka Hara. Complete film credits.
Looking through the work.
The costumes carry patterns that a camera can recognize. Through the Alices App, viewers see animated text mapped onto the performers’ bodies. An audience watching through tablets becomes part of the performance itself.
Hart’s animated text transforms Carroll’s words through repeated substitutions. Campion’s electronic score and the performers’ voices bring that unstable language into the room.
The artist’s project archive · Hart discusses the work, 2025.
The IMC connection.
Hart was a research resident at The IMC Lab + Gallery in 2013. The lab’s original announcement for The Alices credits IMC with augmented production; the performance film above carries the final Eyebeam production credits.
The work grew from The Alices: A Sculptural Opera in One Act, presented at the Arts Club of Chicago in June 2013 with music by Edmund Campion and production by Ellen Sandor.
About the artist.
Claudia Hart works across painting, animation, augmented reality and performance. Trained in art history at New York University and architecture at Columbia, she brings art-historical images and narratives into digital environments, using repetition and transformation to examine identity, power and perception.
Her work ranges from The Alices Walking, The Flower Matrix and The Dolls to the Ghost Paintings, which combine hand-painted surfaces with computer-controlled printing. Her work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albertina and the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof.
Hart is Professor Emerita at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2026 she received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. Current artist biography.