Artworks
Virtual Reality
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Word on the Street is a VR work built up from actual words overheard on the summertime streets of New York — snatches of conversation initially recorded in the vicinity of Wall Street but then in other sectors…
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Point Line Piano uses the new medium of VR to innovate the composition, performance and reception of piano music by fusing its modes of creating, playing, and listening. It does this by means of a live graphic notation…
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Pockets of Space takes two separate forms — as VR and as installation. In VR, it matches interactive binaural 3D sound with immersive imagery comprising up to 300,000 separately controlled points generated in real-time.…
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Our fourth and final collaboration with Merce Cunningham, Loops is an abstract digital portrait of the famed choreographer that attends not to his appearance, but to his motion. Derived from a motion-captured recording…
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Again is an occasional VR piece created for the Choreographic Coding Lab in Mainz 2019 which premiered at the Kunsthalle Mainz as part of the the Between Us show based on the choreography of Taneli Törmä's dance…
3D Film
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Movement often reveals itself when the camera slows it down so that we can take a long close look at it. But it turns out that a fleeting glance at an unanticipated movement gives you a different, more visceral sense of…
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Reaching for the Doors to Paradise
Viewers behold the peculiarly entrancing spectacle of a crowd passing in opposite directions through the swinging glass doorways of a subway station in Queens, New York. Your eyes move within it at extreme close-up…
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This Land Was Made for You and Me
In a single hand-held camera movement, This Land Was Made for You and Me travels across mid-century America, from a lighthouse on the New England coast to old people in rocking chairs on their front porches in…
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Innermost is a visual/audio installation created by Marc Downie in collaboration with composer Natasha Barrett. This work’s stereoscopic imagery and high-order ambisonic sound composition for 70 speakers crafts new…
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Heaven is a a 3D film that exposes the residential sections of Brush Street from East Grand Boulevard in Detroit to Buena Vista Street in Highland Park from the unusual angles obtained by rounding the corners at every…
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Revelation Machine exploits an extreme telephoto lens, shallow depth of field, and the reconstruction of 3D space from successive frames where possible to capture the rich surface details of a single route from the…
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Ulysses in the Subway is an hour-long 3D film create collaboration with the legendary Ken and Flo Jacobs.
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12 Stabs is a 3D film built out of algorithmic responses to sectors of twelve randomly selected shots from the science fiction movie Bladerunner.
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Saccades evokes the intricate web of connections between paintings, sculptures, chairs, windows, doorways, and spaces throughout the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It navigates these spaces not the way a physical…
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Detroit Transect is a large suite of 3D films, each of which forges a new kind of optical documentary that radically differs from the conventional documentary form. These films may be shown individually or in sequences…
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Circling is a section of the 3D suite of films called Detroit Transect by Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser.
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Reaching (2 hours) is the longest section of the Detroit Transect suite of 3D films by Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser. Detroit Transect forges a new kind of visual documentary radically different from the…
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All Day presents a kaleidoscope of Brooklyn spaces, from its vast skyline and horizon to its brownstone stoops, its backyard gardens, its murals and playgrounds. The work’s non-photorealistic scenes are derived from…
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Knight’s Rest is a meditative encounter with the Gardner Museum’s Spanish Chapel. A five-minute 3D film, it derives from a single camera pass that moves into and then back out of the space in a pattern, unconsciously…
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All Sides of the Road derives from a twelve-minute 3D video capture of Old Highway 101 entering and departing Dewitt, Iowa. After the title image, the cameras are pointed directly down at the highway, which becomes a…
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A two-minute film in 3D, Waves (Paignton Postcard) evokes the faded present of the beach, boardwalk, and ocean in Paignton on the “English Riviera.” Video hovers in space as if projected from a phantom home movie…
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plant exists in two forms — as a two-screen 3D installation and as a cinema-resolution 3D film.
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Upending takes the form of 3D cinema and has the viewers’ eyes probing the projected imagery almost as if touching its light, feeling for the illusory surfaces of things as they cross the threshold from abstraction to…
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Our fourth and final collaboration with Merce Cunningham, Loops is an abstract digital portrait of the famed choreographer that attends not to his appearance, but to his motion. Derived from a motion-captured recording…
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A re-envisioning of Ghostcatching (1999), After Ghostcatching is built up from a larger sampling of the motions and vocalizations of Bill T. Jones captured for the earlier work. It explores the themes of disembodiment…
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Stairwell was a 3d site-specific installation for Toronto’s Hayward Gallery, where it deployed three immersive projections arranged vertically opposite the three landings of the gallery’s circular staircase.
Installation
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America Afterimaged is a 3D installation that conjures up the city of Detroit out of misty predawn darkness. The work conjures an urban afterlife out of predawn darkness, with its scenes emerging gradually from the…
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Maenads & Satyrs is an immersive 3D installation commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where it will open in 2018. The work transforms our experience of one of the museum’s key treasures, a Roman…
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Pockets of Space takes two separate forms — as VR and as installation. In VR, it matches interactive binaural 3D sound with immersive imagery comprising up to 300,000 separately controlled points generated in real-time.…
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All Day presents a kaleidoscope of Brooklyn spaces, from its vast skyline and horizon to its brownstone stoops, its backyard gardens, its murals and playgrounds. The work’s non-photorealistic scenes are derived from…
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Becoming is a live artificially intelligent installation in which an abstract body tries to master all the movements present in an iconic 1980s science-fiction film.
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This artwork has participants interacting with a digital intelligence to create unforeseen and original drawings and music in 3d – a performance of drawing whose form is in equal parts physical and virtual.
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plant exists in two forms — as a two-screen 3D installation and as a cinema-resolution 3D film.
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Our fourth and final collaboration with Merce Cunningham, Loops is an abstract digital portrait of the famed choreographer that attends not to his appearance, but to his motion. Derived from a motion-captured recording…
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Into the Forest is an interactive 3D installation that evokes the play and the daydreams of children exploring an ever-changing forest.
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Stairwell was a 3d site-specific installation for Toronto’s Hayward Gallery, where it deployed three immersive projections arranged vertically opposite the three landings of the gallery’s circular staircase.
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A re-envisioning of Ghostcatching (1999), After Ghostcatching is built up from a larger sampling of the motions and vocalizations of Bill T. Jones captured for the earlier work. It explores the themes of disembodiment…
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Upending takes the form of 3D cinema and has the viewers’ eyes probing the projected imagery almost as if touching its light, feeling for the illusory surfaces of things as they cross the threshold from abstraction to…
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Housebound is a stereoscopic installation that uses motion stabilization and geometry recovery in order to place narrative text into the illusory depth of subjective hand-held camera shots. The stereoscopic depth of…
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This installation’s point of departure is the urban sport of parkour, in which the goal is to get from point A to point B as rapidly, as inventively, and often as dangerously as possible. Rather than negotiating real…
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Forest is a visual enactment of outdoor games played in childhood. In this five-screen live installation, virtual children wander through a forested parkland playing hide-and-seek among the tree-trunks. They swing…
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Enlightenment was commissioned by the Mostly Mozart Festival of Lincoln Center to commemorate Mozart’s 250th birthday. Installed in the colonnade of Avery Fisher Hall, it ran night and day for six weeks. As befitting a…
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Arrival envisions indoor public space as an intricate temporal puzzle.
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Trace was originally a solo narrative installation by Paul Kaiser, commissioned by Bell Labs (Lucent) and by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it ran as an installation during the Next Wave Festival of 2001.
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Ghostcatching is a digital art installation that fuses dance, drawing, and computer composition. Based on the motion-captured dance phrases of choreographer Bill T. Jones, the work is a meditation on the act of being…
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Hand-drawn Spaces is a virtual dance installation that presents a mental landscape in which motion-captured hand-drawn figures perform intricate choreography in 3D.
Public
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All Day presents a kaleidoscope of Brooklyn spaces, from its vast skyline and horizon to its brownstone stoops, its backyard gardens, its murals and playgrounds. The work’s non-photorealistic scenes are derived from…
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The first in a two-part public art commission from the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, this adapts After Ghostcatching to two site-specific installations. It puts a one-minute 2D excerpt onto the enormous LED Oculus…
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Crossings was a site-specific all-night installation for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, October 2, 2010. It projected huge figures onto the facets of the “Crystal” facade, Daniel Libeskind’s extension to the Royal Ontario…
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Recovered Light was a site-specific public artwork created for the York Minster in England. Projected directly on the scaffolded eastern facade of the cathedral, it acted as a kind of massive virtual x-ray (90’ tall)…
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Breath was commissioned by the Mostly Mozart festival of Lincoln Center, where it was installed on the facade and in the colonnade of Avery Fisher Hall.
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Pedestrian is a public artwork that projects its imagery directly down onto a city sidewalk or concrete floor. Pedestrian’s digital projection merges with the rough surfaces we walk upon: the tiny denizens we see down…
Live Performance
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Blackletter is a live stereoscopic performance, generated in real time and autonomously aligned to the semi-improvised music of Tom Chiu. It arose from a University of Chicago commission to reflect upon the life and…
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Counterpart takes in any body moving — dancing — within its gaze. It then performs a series of transformations of the body that extend and look back to those created in an earlier collaboration (with Shelley Eshkar)…
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This unusual collaboration between Paul Kaiser and Preeti Vasudevan of Thresh Dance entails no digital technology at all — it is, rather, a one-woman show that interweaves voice and gesture to evoke a personal reality…
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Linked Verse is a composition of music theater that explores the gaps and the overlaps between Japanese and Western ways of being.
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Twice through the heart projected the 3D stage set for a chamber opera by English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. The projected imagery filled a transparent scrim set across the full dimensions of the large stage at…
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how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume… was a collaboration with renowned choreographer Trisha Brown. In this live dance, our projected imagery responded in real-time to the motion-captured live…
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Widely acclaimed as a breakthrough in the integration of dance and technology, the Biped projections provided an ever-shifting visual decor for Merce Cunningham’s dance of the same name. In performance, the imagery is…
Other works
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Footage shot in 2004 in the coal country of McDowell County, West Virginia — snake-handling services, idle teenagers, former miners — finished years later by Bloch, Johnson, and Kaiser.
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Virtually alive in eccentric abstract bodies, the creatures listen to the outside world and respond by making sounds of their own by moving their bodies. Installed as a varied group in the same gallery space, they…
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These two short abstract pieces share simple properties: each is in black-and-white, and each is constructed from cubes.
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Visionary of Theater (1994-7) is Paul Kaiser’s multimedia exploration of theater artist Robert Wilson’s early work, which exhumes vanished performances of the late 60s and early 70s fromthe archive and from key…