Writings
Books
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The stories, sensations, and speculations of more than a dozen people across five decades and four continents, linked passage to passage in 55 quintets.
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Fifty-one short sections set in one unnamed city that “hallucinates a handful of its souls.”
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O—or, The Hazardous Lines of Sight
What begins as a detective novel becomes a book about perception, where every line of sight can be a line of fire.
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Short prose compositions, each set to its own measure, with a new Afterword that states the book’s case.
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Three books of short prose passages in a single volume: Turns, The Penitent, and The North.
Digital Book
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OpenEndedGroup’s rules of thumb for productive collaboration, commissioned by Sitra, the Finnish Fund for Innovation.
Thesis
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Choreographing the Extended Agent: performance graphics for dance theater, 2005.
Recollections (Paul Kaiser)
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The Encircling Self — In Memory of Maryanne
A reflection on a legendary avant-garde composer as experienced first in warm friendship and then in troubled collaboration.
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Travels through Moscow and St. Petersburg in search of the Russian avant-garde: the cult and false future of futurism, poets' house-museums, second-hand Shklovsky, Khlebnikov's numbers, and the translator Paul Schmidt.
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Written for Artforum on Breer's death: his blazing frame-by-frame speed, his inventor's tinkering, and the new kind of attentiveness his films open up, set beside Morton Feldman and Méliès.
Chapters
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Twenty-odd short takes, written for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's catalogue, on how a Roman sarcophagus became a 3D triptych: dreaming and waking, copies and originals, photography and the anti-photographic, abandon and point-clouds.
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Not Fade Away — Thoughts on Preserving Loops
How can a dance outlive its only dancer, or a digital artwork outlive its code? Tracing Loops from Merce Cunningham's hands through BIPED and motion capture, Kaiser proposes preserving such works by their form rather than their materials. From Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance (2016).
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With Shelley Eshkar: on Pedestrian, the public artwork that projected tiny animated passers-by onto city sidewalks, seen from far overhead.
White Papers
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Proximity Fuse – an exploration of desktop 3d documentary was a digital humanities research project created for the then-chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, Jim Leach, under a special chairman’s…
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This project, undertaken in collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute expanded our open source platform Field to make it an advanced tool for the interactive visualization of large datasets on the basis of…
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Spatializing Photographic Archives emerged from a Digital Humanities start-up grant, which funded our making freely available the tools for for the reconstruction of 3D space from unstructured collections of…
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The Choreographic Language Agent project is a small software environment, developed in Field, for exploring variations in choreographic instruction. The promise of formal languages for computers is that, once…
Shorter writings
Paul Kaiser
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Variant and dissenting views of John Cage and his legacy in a composition of unusual structure divided into sixteen parts.
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Husky Kaiser, the vehemence of typewriting, unions & labor law, cutting, social aging, mortal agony & last soliloquy.
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Gray Bucharest under Ceausescu, diagramming stupidity, soap opera, Poe's tracking of thoughts, the essential fallacy of Freud's logic.
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Sentence diagrams, morals, Cape Town, Navajo, notated speech, predictive text & poems, list patterns, cuts, perches of thought.
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Escaping the averages, limits & the limitless, at the fingertip, reading in the dark, eyes in & out, telescoped body, to count steps & breath.
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Other people make books. I am making my mind. Valery's daily notebook, mind mirror, the general not the personal case, a caveat.
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Mindfellows in Valery & Dick, mother to fetus as writer to reader, talking lion, bat, woman, voicing across tongues, pivot names, password: me.
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How Loops draws differently from Leonardo, mistaken manuals of style (Tufte), over-simple conspiracy diagrams (Lombardi).
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Stereovision, homing pigeons, ticker-tape, cave, camera obscura, eye exam, orgones, voyeur, Flicker-track, epileptic, blind space, Verge.
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Immortality through early death, obit photo selection, your life is not an artwork, suicide & survivor's guilt, the girl in the cafeteria (Kerouac).
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Hitler's culture capital, slave labor, Ruhr, situated reading, cultivation, quicksand, Robaix graffiti, lingua franca, French courtly vehemence.
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To applaud patriotism?, of two or more minds, mental gerrymandering (Minsky), Duchamp & one-liner artworks, blame leader for followers?
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Midway, near-misses/direct hits in Pacific, architects' no-places, construction site, spire, drug court, untrue walls, King & Luria memorials.
Marc Downie
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Code wants to be code (and academic openness), 5.08.
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What if performance were distribution?, 2.08.
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Using Photoshop is writing code, 10.07.
Older Essays
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Essay for Ghostcatching catalogue. Also reviews prior works with learning-disabled children, Robert Wilson, & Merce Cunningham. 1999.
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Chapter in Managing as Designing, edited by Boland and Collopy, Stanford University Press, 2004.
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Reflections on childhood games, Ghostcatching, BIPED, Loops. Chapter in Mapping in the Age of Digital Media, 2003.
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On dance and digital dance. Chapter in Envisioning Dance on Film and Video, 2002.
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Artist's statement protesting sponsorship of Whitney show by Phillip Morris (big tobacco), 2000.
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On If by chance, Bruner/Michotte, experimental flicker films, epilepsy.
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Short account of BIPED. Chapter in La Scena Digitale, an Italian anthology on technology and art, 1999.
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A critique of software for children, and a suggested solution. Essay in FYI, Vol. 10, No. 3, Fall 1994.
Older Conversations
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Conversation with choreographer William Forsythe, recorded in 1998 and later published in Performance Research, v4#2, Summer 1999.
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Conversation with software developers and digital artists Susan Amkraut and Michael Girard. Recorded 1998.
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Continues Kaiser talk with Amkraut & Girard. Speculates about emergent behavior in an autonomous artwork like that of children in a playground.