In Loops there are 25 points for each of Merce Cunningham’s hands. Each point is a kind of tiny creature, highly susceptible to three kinds of impulses:
- peer pressure — the desire to act just like neighboring points;
- excitation — the sensitivity to exciting news from neighbors near and far; and
- boredom — the mounting impulse not to be stuck in the same pattern forever.
Boredom, for example, is calculated in a 2d behavioral space, as pictured in the sample diagrams above. As a cluster of points persists with the same behavior, a circle of boredom starts expanding around them, which increases their sensitivity to excitation from without.
As we remake Loops, we’re explicitly annotating some of these previously invisible forces within the artwork. Thus, the Circles of Boredom can appear explicitly from time to time, looking like this:
As an annotation title, Circles of Boredom sounds like a translation from an obscure Jules Laforgue poem. The other titles are more straightforward: Corners Found; Extrema; Fastest; and Center of Speed –> Proximal Points.