Moves brings together three pieces by OpenEnded Group, a trio of artists - Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser - who use advanced mul­ti­me­dia tech­n­iques to explore dance, human movement and the en­vir­on­ment.

The first work on show, Ped­es­tri­an, is un­ob­trus­ively projected onto the floor of the CCA’s foyer, a small, ever-changing arial view of an unnamed city populated by tiny char­ac­ters who run, dance and generally mill about.

The action, such as it is, proceeds slowly, in fits and starts. Oc­cas­sion­ally, a phalanx of uniformed char­ac­ters will process across the frame in formation, like ma­jor­et­tes on parade or soldiers off to war. Slinking burglars steal sealed crates by tor­ch­light. When the clouds break, the citizens of the Ped­es­tri­an pro­jec­tion unfurl their brollies as one, and, for a split second, it looks as though they might just launch into a high-kicking Busby Berkley pro­duc­tion number, but they never do, pre­fer­ring to amble along in loose formation.

These oc­ca­sion­al bursts of drama only serve to underline its real appeal, which is to be found in the tiniest of gestures, the slightest of sight gags, the over­whelm­ing im­pres­sion that something - probably something un­pleas­ant - is about to happen.

Some of these small moments are truly ped­es­tri­an: a girl list­lessly kicks a beer can, a scuffle breaks out between joggers in the park, a couple re­mon­strate with each other. Others are downright odd. A man on the pavement of a city centre street is engaged in a vigorous bout of shadow boxing, ignored by passers by until his com­bin­a­tions open automatic doors. Nearby, a woman repeats more cryptic movements, as if warding off evil, or privately re­hear­s­ing for those big set pieces that never come. Others still simply interrupt a calm scene of walkers with a roll of their shoulders, or by breaking into a restless jog.

There is a sense of dis­con­nec­tion, too, between the actors and their stage. It may be a lim­it­a­tion of the (F)ield software which the OpenEnded Group have used to craft all the works here, or it may be a de­lib­er­ate tactic, but the people that populate the Ped­es­tri­an world have that bouncing weight­less­ness familiar from Pixar an­im­a­tions or Second Life avatars. This is in stark contrast to their sur­roun­d­ings, which, in the dappled shade under a tree, or the ripples in re­flect­ing glass, can be un­n­er­v­ingly realistic. The result matches the ambiguous title for the ex­hib­i­tion - the human movements which have been captured, altered and replayed, and the moves of a game, as if the Ped­es­tri­an en­vir­on­ment is some im­pos­s­ibly complex urban chess board goverened by unknown rules, with the people cast as pieces guided by unseen hands, according to arcane rules.

What follows fails to match up to this early promise.

In the first gallery proper, Point A-B, a new com­mis­sion, is projected onto twin screens. The work is an ex­plor­a­tion of parkour, or free running, the urban sport that sees par­t­i­cipants tra­ver­s­ing city­s­capes in a series of leaps, bounds and stunts, scram­bling up the sides of buildings, back­flip­ping over obstacles and jumping unscathed from dangerous heights. Openended Group have ab­strac­ted the graceful actions of free runners and set them in a sketch city, full of wire-frame models viewed from im­pos­s­ible angles and boiling masses of faint lines that only oc­cas­sion­ally suggest some win­dowsill or piece of street furniture. The idea, pre­su­m­ably, is to give the viewer some sense of the nebulous and fast-flowing view of the city revealed by parkour ‘traceurs’ as they negotiate a newly fluid re­la­tion­ship with un­in­spir­ing sur­roun­d­ings. The endless gyrations of skeletal figures spinning in vaguely suggested space fails, though, becoming nothing more than an onslaught of ill-defined forms. Where Ped­es­tri­an offers an un­set­t­ling, mys­ter­i­ous world of moving figures without motive, Point A-B is downright confusing, a pretty blur of actions without con­sequences.

Forest takes on the ab­strac­tion of movement in space with more success. On five circular screens, children scamper around, playing hide and seek, or clam­ber­ing up into the lower branches of trees. They only hove into view oc­cas­sion­ally, though, obscured for the most part by the actions of al­gor­ith­ms that control the lighting, the camera position, the colour, even the apparent grain of the digital film, each element of the image on a screen suggested by another. It is even possible to see the piece thinking, so to speak, as a quick change on one screen is copied by its neighbour, until all five are, however briefly, in sync.

All this is pleasant enough to watch, and the self-gen­er­at­ing, ever-changing nature of the piece makes it easy to spend a good while in its company, but, ul­ti­m­ately, it is, like Point A-B, merely tech­n­ic­ally im­press­ive, simply pretty.

Openended Group are at their best, then, when they take full control of the digital en­vir­on­ments they design - the slip and slide of Forest or the confused blur of Point A-B are no match for the me­t­ic­u­lous cho­reo­graphy and cinematic verve of Ped­es­tri­an.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 4th, 2008.