Loops: a digital portrait

This sketch outlines some of the background to a collaborative artwork created in September 2001 by Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser. This digital portrait of dance legend Merce Cunningham uses as a point of departure a motion-captured recording of 'Loops', his solo dance for hands and fingers; it uses new real-time non-photorealistic rendering techniques; and it exploits an advanced behavior architecture to structure the performance of the piece. In the resulting animation motion-captured joints become nodes in a network that sets them into fluctuating relationships with one another, at times suggesting the hands underlying them, but more often depicting complex cat's-cradle variations.