Our current work-in-progress, Upending, takes the form of live stereoscopic cinema. One of its main sources of imagery is of the type pictured in the first two stills above, of a garden and of a bed. These are of scenes captured from the real world photographically, from which the original 3D space is then reconstructed. The resulting “point clouds” of these reconstructions form the basis for our renderings. The effect is of haunting stereoscopic spaces that seem to float halfway between our world and another.

Another sort of imagery from Upending‘ derives from gesture drawings captured from a tablet in 3D, as for example in the third still above. This procedure preserves the exact timing of the strokes so that the act of drawing may be orchestrated in time. Often we set the act of drawing in counterpoint to the score, which is of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet (1979) captured in a special spatialized recording of the Flux Quartet. Thus the bowing of a string may evoke the stroke of a line, and vice versa.

Upending has been commissioned by Empac, where it will premiere on March 25, 2010.

 

Ghostcatching anew

A new stereoscopic version of Ghostcatching has been commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, where it will open on June 18. While the new version will adhere to the original arc of the piece and rely on the same motion-capture files of Bill T. Jones, it will be more than a technical updating and expansion of the work — it will also be a creative revisitation of it.

Meanwhile, the original version of Ghostcatching will be paired with our recently restored version of Hand-drawn Spaces in a show at Columbia College in Chicago, opening February 8 and running through April 2.

 

Russia

After a sizable hiatus in our Ideas + Observations section, there’s now a long piece with reflections arising from our time in Russia last spring, which you can find here.

 

Photo archives

Last spring Downie and Kaiser received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project Spatializing photographic archives. This to make freely available the tools for the reconstruction of 3D space from unstructured collections of photographs. By the end of January (note change), we will post a front end for this technique, which will function within our open source Field software environment (see below).

As part of the same grant, we’re working with the Aperture Foundation to create a case study on how to use these techniques as a scholarly tool for historical investigation. This has led us to the work of Richard Misrach, whose acclaimed Desert Cantos series has provided a difficult but exceptionally rewarding test case. In October, we worked with him at one of the original sites for Desert Cantos: The Flood, a part of the town Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea in southern California that had at the time been under water. Now the water has receded, leaving behind enough ruins and landmarks for us to match our spatial reconstruction of the site to the original photos.

Above is a 3D reconstruction of the remains of one of the houses on the site; the small purple dots mark the camera locations from which we rephotographed the site. The illustration is a flat view of what is actually a stereoscopic rendering that allows you to move around the space freely and find views whose sightlines match Misrach’s originals.

More results and reflections to be posted here in the coming months, with our full report to the NEH to appear in late spring.

In addition, we’re making creative use of this technique to fashion “frameless films,” in stereoscopic projection, for our current work-in-progress Upending; an initial demonstration of the possibilities may be found here.

 

Agent

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

A first version, which of course runs on Field, will soon be put through its paces as choreographer Wayne McGregor of Random Dance uses it to create a new dance for fall 2010. We are currently completing the first prototype.

 

Other news

1. We’ve just updated a portable and printable publication that has illustrated pages on each of our main artworks as well as our bios. You can download it at screen or print resolution here.

2. One chapter of Johannes Birringer’s recently published Performance, Technology, & Science features 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.