Paul Kaiser and I have collaborated on seven works: Trace, Inkblot Projections, Pedestrian, Arrival, Playground, Enlightenment, and Point A → B.  Here are some brief descriptions of the works written by Paul Kaiser.  Please visit the Open Ended Group’s website for more complete details on all of these works and a calendar of events.

IKBLOT PROJECTIONS  / 2002-3

Inkblot Projections is a permanent installation at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco that explores the phenomenon of subjective vision. Users range through five inkblots, for each of which they can play back five separate (and marvelously inventive) stories by five different people of different ages and walks of life.

TRACE / 2002

In this solo narrative installation by Kaiser, he conducts a kind of self-surveillance, reflecting on memories of growing up amid the Cold War in Eastern Europe and drawing parallels to the present Internet age of commercial and political surveillance. Voice is matched to image in precise counterpoint: neither the simple sync of narrative film nor the asynchronous sound of the experimental tradition, but rather a precise association of word to image in which the gap between the two tells as much as the connection. Originally commissioned as a full installation by Bell Labs and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for 2002, Kaiser is currently remaking the work with composer Terry Pender.

PEDESTRIAN / 2002

This work of digital art by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser projects its imagery directly down onto a city sidewalk or the concrete floor of an art gallery. Conceived as a public sculpture, Pedestrian’s digital projection merges with the rough surfaces we walk upon. Its tiny denizens wander through a trompe l’oeil illusion in a city that seems to float both upon and within that surface. The figures move with an uncanny accuracy, for their movements derive from those of real people through a process called "motion capture." Their actions are pedestrian—but their over-all patterns evoke a mysterious narrative. For a more complete overview of Pedestrian please visit www.openendedgroup.com.

ARRIVAL / 2003-4

Arrival is a multimedia installation by Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser. It forms a companion piece to Pedestrian (2001). But where the earlier work was a meditation on crowd movement in public spaces, Arrival reflects the patterns of individuals moving in the ambiguous spaces of office, apartment building, mall, and airport – and the synthetic worlds of the video game. Viewers encounter a curious temporal puzzle, for while half the figures move forward in time, the others move in reverse. The activity is complex and hard to decode, as figures carry and exchange briefcases, draw maps, write texts, answer phones, etc. Arrival mirrors the networked surveillance systems forming at our borders and in our minds.

Please visit The Open Ended Group’s website, www.openendedgroup.com for more detailed writings, artists statements, still images, illustrations, etc. for all of these works as well as providing a preview of our works in progress which include Horizon, a permanent public art installation for the new International Terminal in Atlanta's airport and Playground, an interactive installation that explores the elegance and richness of children’s natural movements and the structured choreography and social patterns they when create in play.