OpenEndedGroup

Into the Forest is an interactive 3D installation that evokes the play and the daydreams of children exploring an ever-changing forest. Commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image, it opens there on January 15, 2011.

Upending approaches the new medium of 3D in ways that Hollywood cannot conceive. The film 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 likeness. The scenes evoke a human and natural world that seems on the point of vanishing; in doing so, it enacts a drama of dislocation and re-orientation, with viewers becoming exquisitely aware of their own perceptual processes and of their minds’ continual attempt to spin out meaning from what their eyes take in. The play of images is accompanied by excerpts of a special new recording of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 1 as performed by the virtuoso musicians of the Flux Quartet. The recording places the listener in the center of (rather than at the usual distance from) the ensemble so that every sonic gesture articulates itself across the space of the theater.

two-screen installation that explores the Packard Plant in Detroit in a painterly 3D rendering that paradoxically derives from 18,000 photographs

The film exploits a telephoto lens, shallow depth of field, and the reconstruction of 3D space from successive frames where possible to capture the rich surface details of the route, which range from brick walls and windows to fences and foliage to railings and graffiti.

A portrait of Merce Cunningham.