Crossings, 2010

The OpenEnded Group - New York City, USA

Video Installation, Digital Animation

The night-time crowds drawn to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche will find their foot traffic oddly echoed by virtual figures projected onto the canted walls of the Royal Ontario Museum's Crystal façade. The contours and planes of the architecture, activated by the animation, will set the boundaries and surfaces by which the clambering figures must find their way. Sometimes the figures will wrap around the bends in the faceted façade or suddenly find themselves mirrored, magnified, or transformed on a nearby or distant facet. At other times the figures will seem to have penetrated the architecture and will be seen, x-ray-like, inside it. Occasionally a figure or two will ascend to the top, as if climbing into the sky.

Crossings is a site-specific work that will be precisely aligned to the architecture of the Crystal by means of Field, the OpenEnded Group's software environment that underpins all of their creations and that is available for use by others as open source.

The OpenEnded Group comprises three digital artists — Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser — whose public artworks include Pedestrian (Rockefeller Center and other sites, 2002); Enlightenment and Breath (Lincoln Center, 2006 and 2007), and Recovered Light (York Minster, UK, 2007). For dance-related works for both stage performance and gallery installation, their collaborators include Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and Trisha Brown. In 2010 they created two works for 3D projection: Upending and After Ghostcatching.

Suitable for all ages