After Ghostcatching is a new 3D installation that revisits, re-conceives and reworks our earlier collaboration with Bill T. Jones, Ghostcatching (1999). Commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, After Ghostcatching opened in June as part of the Eighth International Biennial, which runs through January 2.
Crossings
Crossings is a forthcoming work commissioned for Toronto’s, Nuit Blanche, a free all-night art event on October 2nd that will attract close to a million viewers.
In Crossings, the night-time crowds drawn to Nuit Blanche will find their foot traffic oddly echoed by virtual figures projected onto the canted walls of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Crystal facade on Bloor Street. The contours and planes of the architecture, activated by the animation, will set the boundaries and surfaces by which the clambering figures must find their way. Sometimes the figures will wrap around the bends in the faceted facade or suddenly find themselves mirrored or magnified or transformed on a nearby or distant facet. At other times the figures will seem to have penetrated the architecture and will be seen, x-ray-like, inside it. Occasionally a figure or two will ascend to the top as if climbing into the sky.
Into the forest
Into the forest is an interactive 3D installation commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image as part of its Real Virtuality exhibit, which celebrates the redesign and expansion of the museum building. The exhibit opens on January 15 and runs through June 12, 2011.
A viewer encountering Into the forest may choose to step into an illuminated circular zone in front of the artwork, upon which his or her moving outline is inserted directly into the 3d rendering, a spellbinding entrance into the virtual world and a dramatic move in its game of hide-and-seek — for the viewer’s double takes on the same painterly appearance as those of the virtual children populating the 3D world, and is subject to the same spatial occlusions, shadow-casting, and other visual properties of its custom real-time renderer.
Into the forest extends the earlier work Forest by making it both interactive and 3D and by greatly expanding the range of the rendered space and the variety of movements within it.
Upending
Upending takes the form of live 3D cinema and has the viewers’ eyes probing the projected imagery almost as if touching its light, feeling for the illusory surfaces of things as they cross the threshold from abstraction to likeness. This evening-length work premiered at Empac on March 25, 26, and 27.
Newly added to our site are 2D excerpts from the work, which you may view here.
Aperture
The cover story of the current issue (199) of Aperture magazine is about our work — OpenEnded Group: Artists Without Borders. The writer, David Frankel, considers our recent work Upending in depth; the story also features stills from several of our other work (the cover image is a detail from Breath).
Photo archives
In spring 2009 Downie and Kaiser received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project Spatializing photographic archives. This is to make freely available the tools for the reconstruction of 3D space from unstructured collections of photographs.
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.
Our full white paper for the NEH will appear at the end of September, when all the open source code and a new application, built in Field, will be freely available on our site.
We’ve made similar creative use of this technique to for our 3D projection piece, Upending; a demonstration of the initial possibilities we explored 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, is currently being put through its paces by choreographer Wayne McGregor of Random Dance, who is using it to create a new dance for fall 2010.
Russia
After a sizable hiatus in our Ideas + Observations section, there’s now a long piece with reflections arising from our time in Russia, which you can find here.
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.