Housebound is our first work in video. It is video of a special sort: high-resolution and stereoscopic. Housebound also departs from much of our work by telling a story, though again a story of a special sort and conveyed not by actors but by the written lines of the story itself: the text is placed inside the illusory depth of our hand-held shots.

Housebound opened on June 6 2008, at the Panorama show at Le Fresnoy: studio national des arts contemporains, which commissioned the work. The exhibit concludes on July 11.

 

Loops

We have just posted a small Quicktime excerpt from the central panel of the new triptych version of Loops, which you may see here.

The over-all Loops open source project is a collaboration with Merce Cunningham, which includes Creative Commons license for Loops, the original choreography, and and an open source license for Loops, our digital artwork..

To learn more about the over-all project, and for the press release on the presentation, see the Loops open source page.

To participate in our experimental artwork preservation project and download the beta version of the source code to Loops (the digital artwork) or to download the archival versions of Cunningham’s motion-captured performance, proceed to this page (updated May 29, to track the recent changes to Field).

 

Nea Masterwork

Hand-drawn Spaces has just been designated a “masterwork” by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is providing the funds for its complete restoration. The newly restored version will be presented in the public gallery of the World Financial Center here in New York in April 2009. The nea designation came about through the generous advocacy of HarvestWorks, which also supported the creation of the original work.

 

Field

Updates to the alpha release of our open source software, Field , continue apace. Among the recent additions:

• Field now offers an alternative to Python as its scripting language — it now allows you to use Scala” as well — so now you can play with Python, Scala and Java inside one environment. The extremely early implementation of Scala into Field is described here.
• Very much inspired by Nodebox, Field now augments its BasicDrawing component with accelerated image processing by incorporating Apple’s Core Graphics capabilities. A full tutorial and walkthrough may be seen here.
• A Processing plug-in that allows Field to interoperate seamlessly with Processing and its libraries. A simple tutorial for running Processing inside Field is now available here.

 

“Summer of Field”

Three projects this summer are unusual for OpenEnded Group — they aren’t necessarily leading to artworks, and we aren’t necessarily doing the bulk of the work. Rather, we have found three projects that we’ll help other people integrate Field into, and in return we’ll have some wonderfully talented people test and contribute to the code-base.

1. A research project to construct a hybrid linguistics / AI / movement “notepad” that involves British choreographer Wayne McGregor / Random Dance, writer Scott DeLahunta, Cambridge University’s Alan Blackwell’s research group and Artist / Composer Nick Rothwell.
2. With MIT-based architect Mark Goulthorpe we’ll be contributing Field and guidance for the “Springy Thingy” — a gesture-based interface for creating architecture. If all goes well, some piece of this incredible potential will be shown at Seville.
3. Finally, Field will once again form the core authorship platform for the breathtaking Hyposurface.

 

Other news

1. The Horizon project at Atlanta Airport is now back in active development. The architectural design for the International Terminal there gives us a smaller canvas than originally envisioned (it is now a 90 x 25′ led screen, but we aim to pack as many led elements into that space as originally specified, thus making the image much higher resolution).
2. So taken are we by the stereoscopic possibilities we are exploring in Housebound that we are now conceiving of Other Bodies in the same way — with its texts and line diagrams now in 3d and viewable in the odd privacy of little stereoscope viewers. We intend to make an anaglyph preview of one such text viewable online soon.
3. A new thread in our blog collects recent thoughts on the sharing of ideas, code, and artworks — and the failure to do so not only in the art and commercial worlds (where such failures are to be expected), but also in academia (despite its professed ideals).
4. We are about to begin work on a new piece for the theater with composer Maryanne Amacher, an old friend whose radical ways with sound are unlike any other’s. More details to follow soon.
5. The Spanish newspaper El Pais published an article on our Loops preservation project.
6. St. Petersburg in November, where we’ll be showing Loops and, possibly, Point A –> B; more details to come.