The imagery of weaving is generated by a hidden creature that looks only at the spatial ordering of the dancers, from front to back, and tries to retrace this ordering by weaving a set of lines in space. Specifically, it tries to notate these re-orderings that occur from front to back on these lines by weaving the dancers’ respective lines.

As the agent progresses, it moves from fixing its coordinate frame from that of the weaving material to using that of the dancers — the horizontal lines are pulled around by the dancers’ increasingly repetitive winding and unwinding, yet at the same time the material is pulled back onto the stage by the crossings and uncrossings of the perceived movement.

The initial clarity of the strong horizontal lines when disrupted by this rotational force captured from the stage powerfully disturbs the space occupied by the dancers. As the agent catches up with its perception of the dance, the very stability of the woven lines that it manipulates begins to slip away.

In performance

Photographs of Monte Carlo performance. (c) Marc Ginot.