This display is really interactive

“Interact,” a new exhibit at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is aptly named.

Visitors’ heartbeats and shadows are incorporated into the artwork by internationally renowned video installation artists Lynn Lukkas and Cynthia Pachikara.

Jody Boyer, a founding member of the art group Echotrope, which curated the exhibit, said video installation art looks at four-dimensional space as a medium, and uses video as an element in how it approaches that four-dimensional space.

“We wanted to find artists who really could fully utilize the space for its potential for video installation,” she said. “So we felt that the two women we brought together work on parallel trajectories.”

For the exhibition, Lukkas will display “Touch Me/Don’t Touch Me, 2009,” an interactive digital media installation employing the user’s heartbeat to trigger video and audio projected into two galleries.

“It investigates the space between relationships with others and autonomy of self, and all those complex dynamics we have in our human experience of wanting to be close to people and then wanting to be separated from them,” she said. “It uses the emotional space of the viewer as a media.”

Pachikara’s works are “Vertical Horizon(tal),” in which she combines moving images of headlights, streetlights and starlight to create a puzzle about spatial boundaries, and “Shadow Catching,” where the artist isolated light phenomena from the urban environment and recorded it on tape. In this work, Pachikara represents a city using solely shadows.

“Her work uses shadows and the viewer’s body to create a phenomena of interaction,” Boyer said. “With the piece ‘Vertical Horizon(tal),’ when you go into the gallery, you see a projection on the wall, and the viewer actually needs to literally get into the projection, and when your body intersects with the three different video projections that make up the single screen that you see, your body removes some of that content and reveals other projections that are layered into the surface that you’re seeing.”

Lukkas is a media artist and associate professor of Experimental and Media Arts in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Pachikara is associate professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

The UNO Art Gallery, UNO’s Department of Art and Art History and Echotrope are hosting the “Interact” exhibition, which runs through Feb. 19 in the art gallery of the Weber Fine Arts Building, UNO campus, 6001 Dodge St.