Tuesday, Feb. 26 at 6:30 PMHello network,
in my opinion this is an extremely important news due to its implications on traditional notions of documentation, authorship and copyright for choreography and new media. I think it is also an important opportunity for projects and work with this material. Please read an comment.! what do you think?
I created a group for dance-tech (artist, technologies, theorists...etc) interested in relalizing a sharing project using the LOOPS as source material.
Group: Loops/Open Source Projects
Merce Cunningham CompanyThe OpenEnded Group
New York, NY—Merce Cunningham Dance Company and The OpenEnded Group present the public release of Merce Cunningham’s choreography for his signature solo dance Loops, and the accompanying digital artwork created by The OpenEnded Group, on Tuesday, February 26 at 6:30 PM in the Merce Cunningham Studio. This event is co-hosted by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The evening will include a presentation of the choreography and of the digital artwork, remarks from Merce Cunningham as well as Paul Kaiser and Marc Downie of The OpenEnded Group, and a reception.
The choreography for Loops will be made available under a “copyleft” intellectual property license (in the form championed by Creative Commons). This will permit anyone to perform, reproduce, and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes. Simultaneously, the digital artists of The OpenEnded Group (Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser) will release their digital portrait of Cunningham, also entitled Loops, as open source software. This artwork derives from a high resolution 3D recording of Cunningham performing the solo with his hands. The artists will also unveil a completely new realization of the work, now in color.
The open source release will give digital artists and scholars the freedom to study the artwork in detail and to adapt or remix the artwork creatively. The release will also constitute a kind of “living will” for the artwork so that it can be recreated long after current technology has been superseded.
This open source release goes beyond Loops itself, for it includes the complete multimedia authoring system, Field, that underpins Loops as well as other of the most technically challenging artworks
made to date, spanning realtime graphics, interactive performance, and digital music. The open
source release of Loops is made possible through support from the Cunningham Dance Foundation
with major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All the original materials for Loops will become part of the Merce Cunningham Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. The Merce Cunningham Archive was created unofficially by David Vaughan when he was hired by Merce
Cunningham as studio administrator in December 1959. In 1976, his job as archivist was formalized
by a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a two-year pilot project. At the end of that period,
the Cunningham Dance Foundation asked him to remain as the first archivist in the history of
American dance companies. The Merce Cunningham Archive’s works on paper include a virtually
complete set of programs of performances, posters and flyers, Cunningham's personal
choreographic notes from the 1930s to the present, books and periodicals of writing by Cunningham and Cage, as well as books and periodicals about Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
The electronic media works include Cunningham's personal choreographic notes, dating from 1991,
constituting some 50 hours of computer files; original moving camera recordings related to Cunningham's film/video collaborations; master films and videotapes; and recordings of performances and rehearsals, recorded interviews, documentaries, and newscasts featuring
Cunningham and his work. There are approximately 1000 still images, approximately 200 hours of
audiotapes and phonograph records of music relating to the repertoire; and sound recordings of
music and of interviews, lectures and symposia, and oral histories.
Merce Cunningham Studio is located at 55 Bethune Street, 11th floor, in Manhattan.
______________________________________________
Loops
Cunningham created Loops as a solo dance for himself in 1971 and continued to perform it until
2001. Though he originally danced it with his full body, Cunningham soon started channeling its
intricate movements entirely into his fingers, hands, and arms. In this form, Loops became the
signature solo work of Cunningham’s later career, often inserted as a cameo into Merce
Cunningham Dance Company Events. Cunningham eventually set Loops on an artificial “performer,”
a software intelligence embodied in an abstract body coded and created by The OpenEnded artists
for a virtual version of the work.
This digital version of Loops was commissioned by the MIT Media Lab in 2001 and derives from a
definitive recording of Cunningham performing the work in a motion capture studio. This recording
preserved the intricate performance as 3D data, which portrayed not Cunningham’s appearance, but
rather his motion. Cunningham’s 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,
rendered to resemble gesture drawings.
The Loops soundtrack has two elements. The first is Cunningham reading carefully compiled diary
entries from his first three-day visit to New York City in 1937 at age 17, a marvelous evocation both
of the spaces of Manhattan and of the young Cunningham. The second is a musical response to the
sound and semantics of the narration as well as to the structural changes occurring on screen. This
work draws upon sounds from the prepared piano of long-time Cunningham collaborator John
Cage and, like the visual elements, creates itself in real-time. Just as the Loops imagery constructs a
set of interacting processes that observe and recast the motion of Cunningham’s hands, the new
score takes a set of interacting musical processes that listen to and restate the sound and language of
Cunningham’s narration.
Like Loops the physical dance, Loops the digital artwork is always "performed" live (computed and
rendered in real-time), with no two performances the same. As a live performance it suggests the
immortality of a dance that would appear to be fleeting and ephemeral. As a subject for creative
reinterpretation, the digital work offers something radically new. Since the internal structure of Loops
is revealed completely in its visibly open source, re-implementations of it can go far beyond the
present-day practice of “remixes,” which operate only on the surface rather than on the structure of
the original work.
