Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser

Kaiser and Eshkar have collaborated on numerous projects since the mid-1990s. Interested from the start in creating a new kind of 3D space that did not aspire to photorealism, we thought instead about drawing. Soon we formulated the notions of drawing as performance and hand-drawn space, which we then applied to motion-captured performance in a series of collaborations with choreographers. Of these, perhaps the best known are BIPED, with Merce Cunningham, and Ghostcatching, with Bill T. Jones.

For our first work of public art, Pedestrian, we reversed direction by taking on the challenge of photographic simulation. In this work, we projected trompe-l’oeil figures and miniature urban landscapes directly onto city sidewalks. Here, as our interests turned from dance toward the everyday movements of pedestrians and of children, we became our own de facto choreographers.

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In 2001, Marc Downie joined us to create Loops, the first of our works to run in real-time and to generate itself autonomously by means of artificial intelligence. Previously, Downie had pioneered a new approach to generative music and imagery with a series of artworks entitled Musical Creatures.

We now embraced the idea of thinking images, in which what you see is the artwork thinking as it pictures things to itself. We made a dance work with Trisha Brown entitled how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume… in which our projected imagery made sense of the choreography as it was danced on the stage.

how long… seemed to be the culmination of our work in dance, but its underlying ideas led directly to Enlightenment, a work that autonomously reconstructed an extraordinarily complex fugal passage in late Mozart.

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So far as we can tell, Enlightenment is the highest-resolution live digital artwork ever created. Our artworks are now all resolution-independent, which lets us take advantage of higher quality display technology as it emerges. For example, we projected the recent work Recovered Light on the facade of the York Minster at a scale of 20×40 feet.

A parallel interest of ours is in paper — with the recent acquisition of a huge new printer, we can render lines to the page that are so fine that we can’t even see them on our screens. Now we’re busy re-inventing many of our imaging methods to work for paper, whose material properties and possibilities are so different from those of electronic displays. Printing to the page has helped deepen our investigation of complex text and diagrams, addressed fully in a public art installation at Lincoln Center entitled Breath as well as in a work-in-progress called Other Bodies .

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Meanwhile, our original focus on human movement continues, in a series of related works: Point A –>B and Forest / Playground, which explore children’s movements and worlds. Both these projects make use of our new real-time renderer to give a heightened and even hallucinatory sense of 3D representational space, while creating new forms of choreography that draw upon non-traditional sources as parkour/freerunning and palyground movements.

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We are committed to sharing our ideas as well as our technology.

In February 2008 we released our Field, our open source authoring system. In March we will release Loops as open source as well. And we will continue to update our thinking in the postings to the Current topics section of this site.