Paul Kaiser Lecture

In his lecture Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, New York-based Paul Kaiser will draw examples from his large body of work to explore new kinds of imagery that teeter on the verge of abstraction while still illuminating tangible aspects of reality—the trajectories of a dancer, the sound patterns of the New York subway, the intricate counterpoint composition of Mozart, the successive panels of a stained glass window in a cathedral facade, the movements of actors and camera in a science fiction film.

Paul Kaiser is a digital artist, filmmaker, and writer who frequently practices the art of collaboration. Together with his OpenEndedGroup colleague Marc Downie, he has worked in the broadest variety of media and venues: making art for façade, gallery, dance, stage, cinema, and virtual reality. These works respond to an ever-expanding range of materials—drawing, film, motion capture, photography, music, and architecture.

Always in collaboration and always crossing disciplinary boundaries, OpenEndedGroup enters and exits fields without permission from, and without deference to, established disciplinary structures, finding new ways to conceive the world.

OpenEndedGroup works frequently combine three signature elements: non-photorealistic 3D rendering; the incorporation of body movement by motion-capture and other means; and the autonomy of artworks directed or assisted by artificial intelligence.

Over the last eight years OpenEndedGroup has focused most of their creative efforts on exploring the farther reaches of 3D projection. Their 3D films have been presented at Sundance, MoMA, the Hayward Gallery, the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and others. Their 3D projection also constituted the virtual set for live performance of a chamber opera in the huge Sadlers Wells Theater in London. Last year, eight films by OpenEndedGroup were the first digital 3D films to be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection.

Sites of OpenEndedGroup public artworks have included Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Nuit Blanche/The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the York Minster in the United Kingdom, and the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

Outside collaborators in the performing arts have included Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Wayne MacGregor, Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, and the Flux Quartet. The resulting works for the stage have been presented at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, at the Barbican Center and Sadlers Wells in London, and the Festival d’Automne in Paris, among many other venues. Resulting installations have appeared at the MIT Media Lab, Cooper Union, the Kitchen, the Pompidou Center, ICA/Glasgow, ICA/Boston, ICA/London, SITE: Santa Fe, and others.

Kaiser has enjoyed numerous artist residencies at both museums (the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Exploratorium in San Francisco) and universities (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, and many others).

http://openendedgroup.com