Loops is an abstract digital portrait of Merce Cunningham that runs in real time and never repeats. First created in 2001, it has since been remade twice — in 2005 with the addition of Loops Score, and in 2008 with the addition of color and an expansion into triptych form. The 2008 version is open source, part of the Loops Preservation Project. The project addresses cultural memory as endangered by the computer age — an age that perhaps offers a solution. We take as our representative artifacts the two works entitled Loops: not only the digital artwork, but also the original Merce Cunningham’s dance solo for his hands.
Preservation
Oh quickly fading photograph in my more slowly fading hand. - Rainer Maria Rilke
Loops the digital artwork is described here, and the choreography here.
Though Loops the dance and Loops the artwork take completely different physical forms (human body, digital computer), they provoke similar challenges to preservation. Both are always performed live, never quite repeating from one performance to the next. Thus, neither work can be preserved properly in any fixed form, such as film or videotape. And the complexity of both works defies capture by such traditional forms as notation and flowchart.
In this project our intention is not only to preserve and document the dance and the digital artwork, but also to create “living wills” for the choreography and the software that would allow their perpetuation – and propagation – far into the future. This entails releasing both the choreography and the code for the artwork as open source.
The project will give students, scholars, and artists the ability to examine both works with an unprecedented level of precision and with a rich awareness of context (for neither artwork exists in the kind of framed isolation traditionally assumed by viewers and curators — a point made in greater detail in Cultural Ecology.)
Choreography
Loops represents the very essence of Cunningham as both choreographer and performer; the secrets of his art are perhaps to be found most purely here.
Cunningham’s choreography of Loops is opened up completely. Not only can you watch parallel videos of his performance shot from multiple cameras, but you can also study the digital motion-capture files directly – giving you the unparalleled ability to examine Cunningham’s motion from any angle and from any distance, to speed up or slow down playback to any rate, to measure joint angles and their correlations, and even to perform sophisticated statistical analysis of the movement.
The files may be found in open access data.
Code
The digital artwork is also revealed completely, down to its very code, which you can examine (and even rewrite and repurpose). To enable this, we are releasing the software as open source. It operates within, and serves as a key example of, our much larger open source initiative, Field, a digital art authoring environment that underpins many of our other works as well. Field is now available for programmers here in alpha form; the example implementation of Loops will soon be ready there as well.
By releasing our code as open source, we also address the practical problems of keeping the work running. After all, we cannot foresee future formats, programs, computers, operating systems, displays, and so on — but must accept that all present equivalents will be obsolete in very short order (we have already encountered several obsolescences in the brief 7-year life of Loops to date; indeed, every time the work is exhibited, its code must be carefully adjusted to accommodate even small updates in commercial display drivers).
Our open source license allows future (and even contemporaneous) programmers to update the work as well as to create their own derivative artworks – they can forge creative reinterpretations of it in a fashion that will go far beyond the present-day practice of “remixes,” which operate only on the surface rather than on the structure of the original work. Thus we are truly entrusting the future preservation and perpetuation of Loops to unforseen hands.
Public release
The public release of the Loops choreography occurs on February 26th (available here); and the open source code next week .
The full press release is available in pdf form here on the Merce Cunningham website.
Support
The Mellon Foundation supported this preservation project. At the Foundation, Diane Ragsdale has been enormously helpful throughout.
Jacqueline Davis, who directs the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, was a key catalyst for this project. The Mellon-supported Library study on “Dance documentation needs analysis” encouraged us to aim high with this project.
Our thanks also go to the Creative Commons Foundation, which provided the legal and ingenious “copyleft” license that Cunningham has used to share his choreography.