Thought in Motion

The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently featured three of our recent 3D works in a program called Thought in Motion: 3 choreographers captured. This was part of the celebration of the new film venue it opened on 65th Street..

For this occasion, we created new versions of Loops (with Merce Cunningham) and of Stairwell (with Wayne McGregor), and we also screened our recent work After Ghostcatching (with Bill T. Jones).

2d excerpts of Loops and Stairwell may be viewed above. Best to watch them in Vimeo’s full-screen mode, but with scaling turned off. When viewing please try to imagine that crucial 3rd dimension, which is of course missing from these excerpts.

 

Drawn together

Drawn together is an artwork in which participants will interact with artificial intelligence agents to create unforeseen and original drawings — ones whose form is in equal parts physical and virtual.

Wearing 3D glasses and headphones, you will use charcoal or pencil to start making a real drawing on a real piece of paper. When you pause, the computer will answer you by projecting 3D lines that seem to draw themselves on your paper, building upon your lines by echoing, extending, or complementing them. Your surprise at the unexpected appearance of these new marks is compounded by their seeming to float off your page, some hovering above it, some below. The amplified sounds of your drawing form the basis for electroacoustic responses matching those of the 3D projections.

This work is being created during a series of residencies at Georgia Tech this year, where we are collaborating with Gil Weinberg and several of his colleagues in architecture and industrial design (listed here).

 

Two new commissions

We’re just starting work on two new commissions, one for stage, the other for gallery installation.

For Sadler’s Wells in London, we’re creating the 3D set for a mini-opera by Marc Anthony Tournage entitled Twice through the heart. It will be directed by Wayne McGregor, who is making use of our Choreographic Language Agent software (see below) to choreograph a new work for the second half of the performance. The works will premiere on December 1.

Also premiering on December 1 will be a new work commissioned by the Institute for Humanities at the University of Michigan. This installation will conjure up a huge abandoned industrial space in Detroit, using techniques we investigated in the Spatializing Photographic Archives study conducted for the NEH (see below).

 

New research:
visualization of
large data-sets

Work has just begun on a year-long NSF-funded research project for which we’re collaborating with two branches of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — the Tetherless World Constellation (with Peter Fox) and with Empac (with Johannes Goebel).

This project will entail adding capabilities to our open-source Field software that will enable it to address the visualization of very large datasets on the basis of data-mining. Among other things, we will soon port Field to Linux; create a visualization plug-in; and add data-mining libraries.

We develop and test these tools with the Tetherless World researchers; and we will experiment with deploying the resulting ulta-high-resolution visualizations on multiple screens arranged at human scale at Empac.

 

BIPED farewell

Merce Cunningham’s company is conducting its farewell tour, with one of our earliest collaborations, BIPED (1999), one of the featured dances. We are particularly pleased that BIPED will return to New York City on December 8th at BAM. It’s also being performed earlier, in June, as part of the Chekhov Festival in Moscow .

These are the last chances to see the work performed live by Cunningham-trained dancers.

 

Spatializing photography

Spatializing photographic archives, a research project for the NEH that we completed last year, is presented exhaustively in our White Paper (26.5mb). In addition to a description of the open-source software created for this project, we present a case study and proof of concept that entailed a collaboration with noted photographer Richard Misrach. The paper also proposes new kinds of interdisciplinary works that tie photo reconstruction to extensive data-mining, and would blur boundaries between the arts, humanities, and sciences.

 

Agent

We are continuing to collaborate on the Choreographic language agent project, which takes a novel approach to conceiving of dance movements.

A first version, which of course runs on Field, is currently being put through its paces by choreographer Wayne McGregor of Random Dance, who is using it to create a new dance, Undance, in collaboration with the composer Mark Antony Turnage, which will premiere at Sadler’s Wells in December. A workshop with the Random Dance company dancers was held earlier in June in London.

 

Recent writing

Ideas + Observations includes the recent Flesh made word, which starts from a consideration of typewriting and film splicing, moves to the Book of Kells as evoked in a poem by Rebecca Gibson, and then settles into a longer exploration of labor law, social aging, physical anguish, and mortality by looking back on some chapters in the life of Henry Kaiser.

A reflection on the puzzle of Maryanne Amacher is entitled The Encircling Self. Amacher was a noted composer and personal friend, whose collaboration with us on Upending ended in a painful parting of the ways not long before her death last year.

 

Other news

1. Now the portable and printable summary of our artworks includes all our 2010 projects. You can download it at screen or print resolution here.

2. The cover story of issue 199 of Aperture magazine is about our work — OpenEnded Group: Artists Without Borders. The writer, David Frankel, considers our feature-length 3D work Upending in depth; the story also features stills from several of our other work (the cover image is a detail from Breath).

3. A chapter of Alessandra Nicifero’s new book on Bill T. Jones (in Italian, as listed here) is devoted to two of our collaborations with Jones: Ghostcatching and 22.

4. A chapter of Johannes Birringer’s recently published Performance, Technology, & Science consists of an interview with Downie and Kaiser on the role of artificial intelligence in our work (among other topics). This chapter is given as an online sample here in pdf form. A still from the live performance of 22 with Bill T. Jones serves as the book’s cover illustration.