calendario eventi  :: 

X

23/11/2007

Moves

Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA, Glasgow

At the CCA from 24 November to 12 January, Moves is an exhibition by New York based Openended Group; Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser. A new exploration of moving image, the exhibition includes three major works - Pedestrian, a five screen premiere of Forest and new Capture Dance on Screen commission, Point A → B, for its dual opening at the CCA, Glasgow and Jerwood Space, London.

Exploring the relationships between choreography, space, human movement and technology, the exhibition combines Aberdeen born Downie’s pioneering, complex algorithmic systems, with Eshkar and Kaiser’s interests in 3D space, motion capture, drawing and dance to produce exceptionally beautiful moving images.

Point A → B represents the first Capture commission especially for Scotland. It features the new urban sport, parkour, in which getting from point A to point B as rapidly, as inventively, and often as dangerously as possible is the goal. This work takes parkour as its own point of departure in creating a vertiginous virtual world where action, perception, and location are continually overturned. This sensation is heightened by the two parallel projections of the piece, which sometimes coalesce into a single panorama but more often give divergent views into the world they conjure up.

The walls, channels, and voids of the imagery grow and breathe like a living organism, both confining and yielding to the traceurs who traverse it. In this virtual architecture, with physical logic of our own making, the tenets of parkour elaborate themselves in entirely new ways. The film derives sense of the unexpected from the traceur's uncanny ability to see all paths all at once, and then to move among myriad alternatives as if pursuing a path of thought.

The project was developed with the UK-based parkour group Urban Freeflow. Blue (aka Paul Joseph) was the lead performer for the piece; NY Parkour traceur, Exo (aka Exousia Pierce), also performed. Terry Pender created the sound design.

The CCA’s show also includes the premiere of a live five screen version of Forest, representing a fascination with the elegance and richness of children’s natural movements when playing together outdoors. Children’s improvised variations on games of tag and hide-and-seek give rise to an intricate choreography that is all the more beautiful for being unplanned and unrepeatable. The artwork mirrors this by being generated algorithmically; no frame of the continuous animation ever quite repeats. This real time performance occurs within a new custom renderer that creates a strikingly filmic expression of subjective space.

Forest presents a multi-screen visual flow, in which changes in camera position, lighting, setting, and even season ripple and occasionally jump across the screens.

It relies on Openended Group’s new rendering software to take conventional lighting, shadow, and depth-of-field calculations as the source materials for a high resolution fluid dynamics simulation, which in turn causes the image to be constructed out of the propagation of its own grain.

Pedestrian is a public artwork that projects its imagery directly down onto a city pavement or concrete floor. Pedestrian’s digital projection merges with the rough surfaces on the ground: the tiny denizens wander through a trompe l’oeil illusion in a city that seems to float both upon and within that surface.

Pedestrian is entirely synthetic, though the naive observer happening upon it may at first take it for live video. In fact, all of the figures are 3D models and all of their movements derive from a large library of motion-capture data that was extensively re-edited and sequenced for each of its scenes.

The artwork runs in a seamless 13 minute loop. It does not tell a single story, but rather suggests multiple narratives and possibilities, leading its audience to guess at possible storylines and to spirited discussions between strangers about its meanings.

Originally conceived as a homage to New York City, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Pedestrian was first presented at four locations in New York City: outdoors at Rockefeller Center and Harlem’s 125th Street, and indoors in an underground passageway to the subway and at the Eyebeam gallery, however it has toured continuously since its creation.

CCA
350 Sauchiehall Street - Glasgow

stampa

permanent link