Experience
Fathom by Camille Utterback
Glass, stainless steel, projectors, motion sensing cameras, custom software
Gift of Sky and Arwen Dayton
Commissioned for the Stanford Computing and Data Science building (CoDa), Camille Utterback’s site-specific interactive installation Fathom raises questions regarding the connections between our physical bodies, our data, and how we seek to understand and depict ourselves in the world. The work references many human and material histories of representing, encoding, and interpreting data; and different types of meaning-making linked to these processes.
Fathom’s five triangular hand-painted and sandblasted glass panels suspended in the CoDA stairwell are illuminated by the sun during the day, and animated after dark with live computer-generated projections that respond to the presence and movement of people in the building.
The triangle is the essential geometric form in computer graphics, underpinning every 3D model and virtual world. Complex shapes and surfaces are described by breaking them into polygons, and triangles are the simplest polygon.
Utterback developed the wide variety of imagery depicted on Fathom’s triangles in collaboration with the Stanford research community. Sources include the Stanford University Archaeology Collections, the David Rumsey Map Center, Green Library Special Collections, and Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology faculty.
Recording information is always an act of reduction — transforming what we observe into material forms we can work with. These forms have varied across time and cultures and include data recorded with fiber in Incan Khipu knots, mechanically encoded in Jacquard loom cards, printed as charts and maps, and most recently, represented and manipulated via digital visualizations. Fathom explores the connections between our physical bodies and data, and emphasizes how both are essential to understanding and interpreting the world.
A fathom is a unit of measurement roughly equal to the span of outstretched human arms – fingertip to fingertip. Historically, fathoms were marked with knots on a long rope. This line was dropped into a body of water to measure depths that humans could not easily access. Utterback’s installation reminds us that quantifying the world will always be an embodied process, and hints that despite our best efforts, the true depth and complexity of our reality may remain beyond our grasp.
Fathom in the news:
- "Art installation illuminates the history of encoded data" Stanford Report
- "CoDa marks new era for computing and data science at Stanford," Stanford Report
- "Artists Alia Farid and Camille Utterback to create new campus artworks," Stanford Report
Explore Fathom's Triangles
Big Data & Models of the Universe
Glass Design:
Contemporary computer simulations of dark matter. The dark matter depicted is where the Milky Way will eventually form.
Animations:
Historic astronomical charts from varied times & cultures
Overview:
Finding patterns in the stars is a human practice that spans history and cultures. Perhaps because observable elements in the sky move and change, humans have often looked for ways to model and predict these movements. Recording positions of the visible objects in the heavens may be one of our earliest forms of “data collection.”
Astronomical data has been recorded in many material forms including charts and maps, but also in physical structures that many cultures designed to align or track astronomical phenomena. Today, cosmologists and astrophysicists work with huge amounts of data, and often use computer simulations to model and test their hypothesis about how the universe is structured and evolved.
One example of a contemporary simulation using “big data” is the dark matter visualization that Utterback used for the glass design for this triangle. Utterback worked with Stanford Particle Physics and Astrophysics professor Risa Wechsler and Research Software Developer Ralf Kaehler to select layers from one of their 3D simulations for the glass design. Projections on this triangle include videos of dark matter simulations from both Wechsler’s and Particle Physics and Astrophysics professor Tom Abel’s research.
Standing on the fourth floor mezzanine across from the triangle (by the QR code sign) reveals different layers of star maps from different times and cultures.
Starting in the fall of 2025 Utterback, Wechsler and Fathom’s Lead Creative Technologist Charlotte McElwain will use a recently awarded Humanities Seed Grant to work with students to develop new animations for this triangle. The new imagery will be based on the astronomical data streaming nightly from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory as part of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This survey will image the entire Southern Hemisphere for the next decade, producing 15 terabytes of data every night.
Mapping & Geospatial Information
Glass Design:
Abstracted Bay Area topographic map
Animations:
NOAA satellite live stream (the past week of Pacific Northwest clouds, fog, and snow)
Video of Bay Area flora and features
Maps from the David Rumsey Map Library (1899 onwards)
Overview:
Maps are one of the earliest forms of data visualization and part of a rich history of cartographic storytelling. Mapping and geospatial information have evolved from early cartographic coordinate systems into the sophisticated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) we rely on today.
Spurred by global conflicts like World War II, innovations such as radar, aerial photography, and eventually satellite imagery laid the groundwork for reliably encoding spatial data. The digital revolution of the 1960s and ’70s introduced geospatial file formats for remote sensing, enabling the use of vector and raster models to represent features like boundaries, elevation, geographic names, hydrography, land cover, orthoimagery, structures, and transportation networks. This long arc of development—from centuries-old cartography to advanced digital systems—is now embodied in the work of agencies like NOAA, who use geospatial encoding to analyze, monitor, and visualize our world. Ultimately, this powerful technology deepens our understanding of the complex systems that shape our planet.
For this triangle Utterback worked with Geospatial Instruction and Reference Specialist David Medeiros to use GIS software to create a topographic map of the Bay Area, which she then abstracted for the glass design. Seen from inside the building, the center white area of the glass is the Bay, with Palo Alto located in the lower left edge or the triangle.
The brightly colored swirling projections on this triangle are a dynamically updating loop of composite satellite images of the last seven days of clouds, fog and snow from NOAA’s GOES Image Viewer of the Pacific Northwest. Utterback’s team created a python script that downloads these images every 10 minutes and continually updates them into a new video. Other projections include historic maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection, primarily from Palo Alto and the Bay Area, and video of natural imagery shot from around the bay.
Walking in front of this triangle on the stairs triggers different combinations of imagery.
2D Charts & Data Visualization Histories
Glass Design:
Chart of 34 years of high and low water levels in the Seine River, France (1732-1766), published in 1770
Animations:
Printed charts and graphs (varied times & cultures)
Generative animations based on historic data visualizations
Overview:
The glass design on this triangle is based on geographer and cartographer Philippe Buache’s Eaux de la Seine etching published in 1770 in Paris, France. Buache’s chart shows the dates and amplitude of high and low water levels of the Seine River in the first and second half of each year from 1732-1766. For this image, Buache created a new type of drawing, a profile-style chart. The pairs of high and low water level measurements seen in the vertical bars are arranged side by side with their left to right position indicating time. Because of this innovation, Buache’s Eaux de la Seine is an important precursor to the line graphs and area charts or “bar graphs” in common use today. It is also one of the earliest known hydrological visualizations.
Utterback was fascinated by how the vertical bars in Buache’s chart appear to be illustrations of the flat pieces of wood that would have been positioned in the river to mark the changing water levels. Notice how the wavy lines in the bars reference the water of the river. The bars in his “bar chart” both depict the physically recorded marks, use them more abstractly as data indicating the recorded measurements.
This triangle does not have camera interaction, but cycles through different historic charts and graphs from the Rumsey Map Collection, and displays generative animations based on this historic imagery.
Binary Mechanical Encoding
Glass Design:
Jacquard loom program punch cards & floral fabric design (c.1906)
Animations:
Scans of Jacquard silk and corresponding loom patterns (1867-1931)
Generative binary animations
Overview:
Mechanical encoding practices, such as the punch cards used to automate weaving patterns for Jacquard looms, are important precursors to binary encoding practices used in all contemporary computing. In 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom attachment device that automated how patterns were woven. Fabric designs were painted onto gridded paper and the designs were then translated into punched cards. A punched hole or a lack of a hole in the card created a meaningful unit of difference for a weaving pattern. Holes or non-holes corresponded to a warp thread being lifted or not in the weaving. Cards were stitched together in a continuous loop and fed into the loom, allowing different patterns to be loaded into the loom for weaving. This automated approach enabled weavers to create more complex designs, quicker and with more accuracy, producing affordable fabric that became available to a wider public. Early computers also used physically punched cards with binary (hole/no-hole) encodings to load software instructions.
Stanford Library’s Green Special Collections has multiple early pattern and weaving manuals by cloth makers from Germany, France, and Switzerland dating between 1772 and 1909. Many of these contain samples of the actual woven silk cloth as well as the gridded paper designs for the loom. Stanford Libraries Digitization services created high resolution scans of both the silk cloth and the patterns for Utterback which she and her team overlaid to create the animations on this triangle.
Walking in front of the triangle projections of the weaving pattern reveals the silk woven from that pattern. The animations also cycle through diagrams from the loom manuals, and a generative binary animation that “weaves” between the silk and the gridded pattern.
Ancient Fiber Record Keeping
Glass Design:
Data encoded in Incan khipu fiber knots (1400s and earlier)
The knots in the colored glass are based on a khipu in Stanford’s Archaeology Collection
Animations:
Khipu knot-tying video
Images and diagrams from contemporary khipu research
Overview:
Khipus are a fiber based technology invented and used by ancient Andean cultures for sophisticated record keeping and accounting. “Kuipu” comes from the Quechua word for “knot.” Incan recordkeepers, khipucamayoq, encoded information in khipus by using different types of knots, the direction and placement of the knots, cord color and types of fiber used in the cords, and even the ply (spin) of the cords to indicate meaning. This encoding technology was in widespread use in the Incan empire during the 16th century when the Spanish colonists first encountered it, but the Incan systems were based on much earlier Wari knot-tying systems dating from as far back as 600 CE. Not all of the encodings are currently understood by scholars, though the specific knots used to encode the decimal digits 1 through 9 are known, and zeros are indicated by an area of unknotted thread in a sequence. Current scholars believe that there are two general types of khipu, some used for numeric record keeping, and others where the knots represent different types of encodings, perhaps more narrative in nature.
Modern research tools have brought about a resurgence of interest in khipus as scientists seek to decipher their meaning. Scholars have recently created a Khipu database (https://khipufieldguide.com/) to document all known khipu and create a consistent digital encodings of the knot and fiber elements in each khipu. This database helps make it possible to use machine learning to try to decode the complex encodings in these objects.
Utterback included khipu imagery on this triangle to highlight a deep cultural history of material encoding practices, and a contemporary data science practice that current scholars are using to research these objects. While developing the imagery for the triangle, she learned that a khipu, likely collected by Jane Stanford, is housed in Stanford’s Archaeology Collections. With the help of Stanford Archaeology Collections Curator and Assistant Director Danielle Raad, Utterback connected with Cordage Specialist Saoirse Byrne who is working with contemporary khipu scholars to reconstruct knot tying methods from the khipus they are studying, and to encode these in the Khipu Field Guide. Utterback and her team worked with Byrne to record her hands tying khipu knots representing different digits. This video is some of the imagery projected on the triangle.
When the knot-tying video is not playing, walking in front of this triangle renders your image in a fiber-like pattern and allows you to see through the different layers of glass.
Artist Statement
Camille Utterback bridges the conceptual and the corporeal by refiguring the possibilities for interaction with digital media.
Driven by a fascination for the possibilities of digital systems and a deep love of materiality, Utterback creates embodied interfaces that engage the viewer's physical presence. Using cameras to capture human movement Utterback develops physical-digital systems that go beyond engaging just the fingers and eyes, instead responding to participants' locations, spatial relationships, and gestures.
Through her work, Utterback explores how we use our bodies to create abstract symbolic systems and how these systems impact our physical selves. By designing digitally generated installations that engage the body, Utterback interrogates our connection between the real and the virtual, shifting focus back to the embodied self in our increasingly mediated world.
About the Artist:
Camille Utterback (born 1970, Indiana) is a Stanford faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History in the School of Humanities and Sciences and, by courtesy, in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering.
Utterback’s interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery. She was an early artist to program computer vision systems to respond in real time to human movement and gesture as part of her digitally generated work. Recently, she has begun projecting onto materials like textured glass to create an intriguing interplay between her dynamic imagery and the physical world. By creating complex optical effects in a shared real-world environment, Utterback asks us to pay attention to our embodied awareness.
Utterback’s many awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a U.S.Patent. Exhibition highlights include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Artists website: www.camilleutterback.com
Project Team
Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Project Manager, Design & Engineering Support
Charlotte McElwain, Lead Creative Technologist
Mary Franck, Creative Technologist
Yingke Wang, Project & Programming Support
Mayer of Munich, glass fabrication
TriPyramid Designs, frame fabrication and engineering
Atthowe Fine Art Services, artwork installation
Ready to explore? Use our Public Art App to navigate Stanford’s full collection of public art.
Cantor Collection
Learn more about the works of outdoor art in the collection of the Cantor Arts Center, including the Rodin Sculpture Garden, or join museum docents for a campus art walking tour.
Campus Public Art Proposals
Members of the Stanford community (students, faculty, and staff) can submit proposals for temporary public art projects on campus. Proposals are reviewed by the Office of the Vice President for the Arts.
Public Art Committee
Stanford’s Public Art Committee is responsible for overseeing a strategic plan for public art, including both outdoor art and art in public spaces of academic buildings and other campus facilities. The committee aims to make Stanford a destination for public art, drawing on the university’s unique natural and built environment, and to create an experience of creative vitality for all visitors to Stanford’s campus.
