Loops is an abstract digital portrait of Merce Cunningham that runs in real time and never repeats. Originally commissioned by the M.I.T. Media Lab for the “ID/Entity” show, its sound score was re-made for Ars Electronica in 2005, and in 2007 it was re-created in tryptich form and its underlying code released as open source.

Loops is a portrait of Cunningham, but it attends not to his appearance, but to his motion. It is derived from a motion-captured recording of his solo dance for hands and fingers. The motion-captured joints become nodes in a network that sets them into fluctuating relationships with one another, at times suggesting the hands underlying them, but more often depicting complex cat’s-cradle variations. These nodes render themselves in a series of related styles, reminiscent of hand-drawing, but with a different sort of life. Many viewers liken their experience of seeing Loops to that of gazing into nature: its flickering motions put them in mind of fire or of primitive biology, perhaps seen under a microscope.

Just as Cunningham’s motions generate the imagery in Loops, we now use his voice to generate the music. The initial source is Cunningham reading diary entries from his first visit to New York City in 1937, when he was 17 years old–an old man’s voice evoking an earlier city and an earlier self. Later we had the idea was that if we had Cunningham speaking, then we would have John Cage listening to him, at least virtually. And so we propelled the intonation and rhythm of Cunningham’s sentences into a virtual instantiation of Cage’s prepared piano.

The pattern of the notes they strike is picked out and then evolved by autonomous musical intelligences, not only “listening” to the sound of this speech, but also “reading” the content of its sentences: the compositional structure derives from the spatial/metaphorical structure of that text. The musical “score” for this work does not specify the exact notes to be played, but instead establishes a series of potential relationships between intonation, metaphor, and a range of equivalent piano tones. These relationships are selected and played out slightly differently each time.

Loops is computed in real-time and is, in effect, a live performance (the program is the only other “performer” of this choreography than Cunningham, who has never set the work on any other dancer.) Thus Loops, the digital program, confers a weird kind of immortality on Loops, the physical dance, for as it keeps performing itself, it keeps revealing something new to us with every playback.

Triptych

In its current triptych arrangement, three views of Loops are presented. The central screen has the virtual camera facing Merce’s hands directly, while the flanking screen give sideway views from the left and right respectively.