Upending

To make an 80 minute work for high-definition stereoscopic projection requires several things - subject and themes to reward the specific perceptual explorations that 3D enables; a physical environment (a theater) in which to study and refine these perceptual phenomena at actual scale over significant periods of time; and a real-time, reconfigurable digital toolset which can be revised, recast, and reconsidered rapidly and radically enough to pursue and pin down any new possibilities that might swim into view.

Our current work-in-progress is Upending, which will premiere on March 26, 2010 at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Empac) in upstate New York. Upending is a drama of disorientation and reorientation that is enacted on both perceptual and thematic levels. With its imagery deriving from the everyday world - a chair, a door, a garden, a woman - the viewer's perceptual ground continually gives way as orientation and scale are probed and called into question. Even when seeing an ordinary object very clearly for what it is, the viewer can't help reading it simultaneously at multiple scales - as a celestial object, perhaps, and as a subatomic structure.

As we present several rough-cut scenes from Upending, we will discuss how we went about creating them. We will show how we use our open-source toolset (Field), and we will present the special methods by which we've capture three-dimensional imagery (from unstructured photographic stills, from stereoscopic video, and from 3d drawing capture). We will also show how we tie our stereoscopic imagery to our musical score, a special spatial recording of the Flux Quartet performing Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 1.

Bio

Downie and Kaiser are two of the three artists in the OpenEnded Group. Based in New York and Chicago, OpenEnded creates works for stage, screen, gallery, page, and public space.

In the field of dance, they have worked most closely with Merce Cunningham (Hand-drawn Spaces, 1998; Biped, 1999; and Loops, 2001-8), but also with Bill T. Jones (Ghostcatching, 1999) and Trisha Brown (how long ..., 2005). Their public artworks include Pedestrian (multiple sites, 2002); Enlightenment and Breath (Lincoln Center, 2006 and 2007), and Recovered Light (York Minster, 2007). Their first stereoscopic piece was an installation entitled Housebound (2008).

Exhibit and performance venues have included the Barbican Centre, the Whitney Museum, ZKM, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, the Center for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the ICA (London), the Wexner Center for the Arts, the mit Media Lab, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Theatre de la Ville, and many others.

Among the prizes they have won individually or collectively are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Bessie award, an Arts in Multimedia Award from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lucent, an Osher Fellowship from the Exploratorium, and an Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica.