This project addresses cultural memory as endangered by the computer age — an age that perhaps offers a solution. We take as our representative artifacts the two works entitled Loops: (1) Merce Cunningham’s dance solo for his hands and (2) the digital artwork we derived from that dance.

Oh quickly fading photograph in my more slowly fading hand. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Loops in its current form is described here.

Though Loops the dance and Loops the artwork take completely different physical forms (human body, digital computer), they provoke similar challenges to preservation. Both are always performed live, never quite repeating from one performance to the next. Thus, neither work can be preserved properly in any fixed form, such as film or videotape. And the complexity of both works defies capture by such traditional forms as notation and flowchart.

In this project we intend not only to preserve and document the dance and the digital artwork, but also to create “living wills” for the choreography and the software that would allow their perpetuation – and propagation – far into the future. This entails releasing both the choreography and the code for the artwork as open source.

The project will give students, scholars, and artists the ability to examine both works with an unprecedented level of precision and with a rich awareness of context (for neither artwork exists in the kind of framed isolation traditionally assumed by viewers and curators — a point made in greater detail in context + specification.)

 

Choreography

Loops represents the very essence of Cunningham as both choreographer and performer; the secrets of his art are perhaps to be found most purely here.

Cunningham’s choreography of Loops will be opened up completely. Not only will you be able to watch parallel videos of his performance shot from multiple cameras, but you will also be able to study the digital motion-capture files directly – giving you the unparalleled ability to examine Cunningham’s motion from any angle and from any distance, to speed up or slow down playback to any rate, to measure joint angles and their correlations, and even to perform sophisticated statistical analysis of the movement.

 

Code

The digital artwork will also be revealed completely. Not only will you be able to watch the runtime version, but also to examine (and even rewrite and repurpose) its underlying code. To enable this, we will release the software as open source. (See context + specification)

By doing so, we also address the practical problems of keeping the work running. After all, we cannot foresee future formats, programs, computers, operating systems, displays, and so on — but must accept that all present equivalents will be obsolete in very short order (we have already encountered several obsolescences in the brief 7-year life of Loops to date; indeed, every time the work is exhibited, its code must be carefully adjusted to accommodate even small updates in commercial display drivers).

Our open source license allows future (and even contemporaneous) programmers to update the work as well as to create their own derivative artworks – they can forge creative reinterpretations of it in a fashion that will go far beyond the present-day practice of “remixes,” which operate only on the surface rather than on the structure of the original work. Thus we are truly entrusting the future preservation and perpetuation of Loops to unforseen hands.

 

Public release

The public release of the Loops choreography and code will occur on February 26th, after which both will be available for download from this website.

New stills may be seen here.

At the same event, a new three-screen version of Loops will be unveiled.

The full press release is available in pdf form here on the Merce Cunningham website.