Dennis Summers has exhibited artwork internationally for over 35 years. As an undergraduate he studied Chemistry and Fine Art, and he went to grad school at The Ohio State University's New Genres program, one of the few at that time. Accordingly, most of his artwork has been inspired by ideas from science, especially physics and ecology, and constructed in a wide range of genres and media. For about the first fifteen years he created multi-media installations, and subsequently transitioned to digital media. His artists books, videos and interactive digital projects are in the collections of several major museums including the MOMA, the Pompidou Center, and the International Dada Archive. In 1995 he was included in the “Interventions” exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he created a large scale installation and a corresponding museum-wide performance art event every Sunday for two months. In 1996 he received a Michigan Creative Artist Grant to create an interactive cd called Crosslinked Genome or Data Fugue. The cd was included in an early show of digital art called Contact Zones: The Art of CD-ROM that traveled internationally.
In 1999 Summers animated Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, bringing him attention from the small world of Duchamp scholars, and winning several awards. Subsequently, much of his artwork has consisted of computer generated imagery.
His global memorial artwork The Crying Post Project, was begun in 2001 at the Mildura Palimpsest #4 Art and Science Symposium in Australia, where I was also a featured speaker. This artwork consists of multimedia markers placed at sites of environmental disasters throughout the world, including the site of the Exxon Valdez sinking, Bhopal, India, and most recently Flint, Michigan. Associated with the posts are a series of digital prints, and both an interactive 3D website, and an interactive Flash website (sadly, due to changes in web protocol, while available, both of these are now difficult to access).
In contrast to this somewhat conceptual project, in 2005 Summers began creating a series of computer generated abstract “color field” videos called The Phase Shift Video Series. These videos have been described as “light works that morph, actualize themselves in time, engage and animate our perceptions in ways for which we’re only marginally prepared.” Always projected or displayed at larger than human scale, they have been exhibited in museums, galleries, outdoor public sites and other non-traditional venues internationally, including an exterior wall of the Detroit Institute of Arts, atop the Kitchener, Ontario City Hall building, and at a Russian airport. One of them was a purchase prize winner in the Spanish Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo in 2006. About ten years later a change in creative process led to The Interference Video Series. One of these was commissioned for a huge outdoor screen at the Cobo Center in Detroit. Much of his artwork has been crafted using collage strategies. Research into this topic helped inform his current series of short, dense, digitally created collaged videos inspired by artist and scientist pairings called Slow Light Shadow Matter.
In 1995 Summers instituted the digital animation program for The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, where he taught as an Associate Professor for seven years. He wrote a textbook for animators titled Texturing: Concepts and Techniques, published by Charles River Media in 2004. In addition, he has written a number of articles on his own art and that of others throughout his career, including three articles for the Leonardo Journal. He has also been active in delivering presentations on a range of topics at academic conferences. He is the arts liaison for The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts. At SLSA in 2012 he gave the first of many talks about collage theory, which led to writing a book chapter included in Knowledge Visualization and Visual Literacy in Science Education, published by IGI Global in 2016. In 2021 his article on collage theory and the posthuman was published in The Journal of Posthumanism.