Openended Group

OpenEndedGroup comprises two digital artists, Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser, whose long collaboration dates back to 2001. (Shelley Eshkar was a part of the group until 2014.)

OpenEndedGroup artworks span a wide range of forms and disciplines, including dance, music, installation, film, and public art. In the field of dance, they have worked most closely with Merce Cunningham (Hand-drawn Spaces, 1998; BIPED, 1999; and Loops, 2001-8), but also with Bill T. Jones (Ghostcatching, 1999 and 22, 2005), Trisha Brown (how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume, 2005), and Wayne McGregor (Choreographic Language Agent, 2007-9, and Stairwell, 2010).

Their public artworks include Pedestrian (multiple sites, 2002); Enlightenment and Breath (Lincoln Center, 2006 and 2007), Recovered Light (York Minster, 2007), Crossings (Nuit Blanche/Royal Ontario Museum, 2010), and All Day (Barclay's Center, 2013).

In recent years OpenEndedGroup has created new approaches to 3D projection, which has resulted in works of digital cinema such as Upending (2010) and (2012), Knight's Rest(2013), Saccades(2014), and Ulysses in the Subway (with Ken and Flo Jacobs, 2016); the shorter installations After Ghostcatching (with Bill T. Jones, 2010), Stairwell (with Wayne McGregor, 2010), and plant(2011); the multi-screen installation Maenads & Satyrs(2018); the interactive installations Into the Forest(2011) and Drawn Together(2012); and the chamber opera Twice through the heart (with Mark Anthony Turnage and Wayne McGregor, 2011).

Detroit Transect(2013-14) is a suite of five 3D films that forge a new form of "optical documentary." This work and three others were the first digital 3D films to be acquired by MoMA for its permanent collection.

Pockets of Space(2018), created in collaboration with composer Natasha Barrett, premiered in two forms at the Pompidou Center: as an immersive work of virtual reality, and as a 3D projection in a complex ambisonic sound space. 

Among the prizes they have won individually or collectively are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Bessie award for the BIPED decor.

They have presented their work at MoMA, the Pompidou Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival, the Barbican Center, the Hayward Gallery, ICA Boston, Sadler's Wells, the Festival d'Automne, the Sundance Film Festival, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Rome Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image, SITE Santa Fe, EMPAC, MASS MoCA, the MIT Media Lab, ICA London, Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival, the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), the Kiasma museum, and many other venues.

OpenEndedGroup has had artists' residencies at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Stanford University, IRCAM, the University of Chicago, the MacDowell Colony, the University of Michigan, EMPAC, Le Fresnoy: studio national des arts contemporains, Georgia Tech, Arizona State University, Harvard University, Columbia University, the MIT Media Lab, the Brooklyn Academy of Music/Bell Labs, and UC: Irvine.