KINODANCE-2009
is hosting a residency for two digital artists Paul Kaiser and
Marc Downie (USA), members of the OpenEnded Group. During the
residency at the KINODANCE Festival 2009, the artists will offer:
I.
April 7-21, 2009
with the opening on
April 7, Tuesday, 16:00, Exhibition
Hall “Poterna” – the Peter and Paul Fortress.
“Point
A–>B” – inspired by parkour – “the
urban sport in which the goal is to get from point A to point
B as rapidly, as inventively, and often as dangerously as
possible. Rather than negotiating real spaces, here our virtual
traceurs encounter a vertiginous world where action, perception,
and location are continually overturned. This sensation is
heightened for the viewer by the two parallel projections
of the piece, which only rarely coalesce into a continuous
panorama — more often they divide the space like a chasm.”
II.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009,
19:00 –
a workshop/master class, iCLub, Apple Cafe
The
master class is for artists who would like to work with programmers,
for artists who can code, open source advocates & programmers
(who know Java and Python -- and perhaps Scala), scientists;
interface designers interested in collaborations with artists.
III.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 18:30
– a screening/discussion at Proarte,
During
the presentation the artists will give an overview of the
whole body of their work and discuss their philosophy, approaches
to the artistic practice and technology enabling them to realize
their visions. The talk features BIPED, the artists’
collaboration with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, the
artists’ collaboration with Bill T. Jones as well as
their collaborations with Trisha Brown among others.
Artists
Biographies:
Paul
Kaiser is
a digital artist and writer. He earned his bachelor’s
degree in film and art history from Wesleyan University (1978;
summa cum laude), and his M.Ed. in special education from American
University.
Kaiser’s
early art (1975-81) was in experimental filmmaking and writing
for recorded voice. He then spent ten years teaching students
with severe learning disabilities, with whom he collaborated
on making multimedia depictions of their own minds. From this
work, he derived two key ideas - mental space and drawing
as performance - which became the points of departure for
the solo and collaborative digital artworks he has been making
since the mid-90s.
Kaiser
has been a prolific collaborator – in addition to extensive
collaborations with his key colleagues Shelley Eshkar and
Marc Downie, he has worked with Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham,
Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown. These works span a wide range
of forms and disciplines, including dance, music, installation,
and public art.
Kaiser
has taught at Wesleyan, Harvard, Columbia, and San Francisco
State, with artist’s residencies at Le Fresnoy - Studio
National (France), Cooper Union, UC-Irvine, Harvard, Ohio
State University, The Exploratorium, and Arizona State University.
He has written and lectured extensively about digital art,
filmmaking, dance, and education.
Kaiser
was recently given the John Cage Award by the Foundation for
Contemporary Arts (2008). In 1995, he was the first digital
artist to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also received
a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian Award (1992) for his multimedia
work with children. Other honors include a Media Arts Fellowship
from the Rockefeller Foundation (2006), an Award of Distinction
and two Honorable Mentions at Ars Electronica, an Osher Fellowship
at the Exploratorium, and prizes from the Congress of Research
in Dance and the Bessie Awards.
Marc
Downie
is an artist and artificial intelligence researcher. Born
in Aberdeen, UK, he has an MA in natural science and a MSci
in physics from the University of Cambridge, graduating at
the head of his class with the Mott Prize in the Natural Sciences.
In 2005 he obtained a PhD from MIT’s Media Lab, writing
a thesis entitled “Choreographing the Extended Agent.”
Downie’s
complex algorithmic systems are inspired by natural systems
and a critique of prevalent digital tools and techniques.
His interactive installations, compositions, and projections
have presented advances in the fields of interactive music,
machine learning, and computer graphics.
In
addition to extensive collaborations with his key colleagues
Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Downie has worked with Merce
Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown. While he was
at the MIT Media Lab, he collaborated extensively with colleagues
there, playing key roles in projects such as as AlphaWolf
(A Prix Ars Electronica honorable mention in 2002), Dobie
(SIGGRAPH 2002), and (void *) (SIGGRAPH 2000), and Jeux Deux
(2006).
Downie
is currently preparing his multimedia authoring system for
release as an open source project. Website: http://www.openendedgroup.com/
History
of Open Ended Group:
“Kaiser
and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the
mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind
of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought
instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing
as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied
to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations
with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are
BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill
T. Jones.
For
our first work of public art, Pedestrian, we reversed direction
by taking on the challenge of photographic simulation. In
this work, we projected trompe-l’oeil figures and miniature
urban landscapes directly onto city sidewalks. Here, as our
interests turned from dance toward the everyday movements
of pedestrians and of children, we became our own de facto
choreographers.
In
2001, Marc Downie joined us to create Loops, the first of
our works to run in real-time and to generate itself autonomously
by means of artificial intelligence. Previously, Downie had
pioneered a new approach to generative music and imagery with
a series of artworks entitled Musical Creatures.
We
now embraced the idea of thinking images, in which what you
see is the artwork thinking as it pictures things to itself.
We made a dance work with Trisha Brown entitled “how
long” does the subject linger on the edge of the volume…
in which our projected imagery made sense of the choreography
as it was danced on the stage.
“how
long…” seemed to be the culmination of our work
in dance, but its underlying ideas led directly to Enlightenment,
a work that autonomously reconstructed an extraordinarily
complex fugal passage in late Mozart.
So
far as we can tell, Enlightenment is the highest-resolution
live digital artwork ever created. Our artworks are now all
resolution-independent, which lets us take advantage of higher
quality display technology as it emerges. For example, we
projected the recent work Recovered Light on the facade of
the York Minster at a scale of 20x40 feet.
A
parallel interest of ours is in paper — with the recent
acquisition of a huge new printer, we can render lines to
the page that are so fine that we can’t even see them
on our screens. Now we’re busy re-inventing many of
our imaging methods to work for paper, whose material properties
and possibilities are so different from those of electronic
displays. Printing to the page has helped deepen our investigation
of complex text and diagrams, addressed fully in a public
art installation at Lincoln Center entitled Breath as well
as in a work-in-progress called Other Bodies .
Meanwhile,
our original focus on human movement continues, in a series
of related works: Point A –>B and Forest / Playground,
which explore children’s movements and worlds. Both
these projects make use of our new real-time renderer to give
a heightened and even hallucinatory sense of 3D representational
space, while creating new forms of choreography that draw
upon non-traditional sources as parkour/freerunning and palyground
movements.
We
are committed to sharing our ideas as well as our technology.
In February 2008 we released our Field, our open source authoring
system.”
