NLOOPS was created immediately after working with the "rings" in the Three Ring Circuit, I was thinking about looping structures in time, and interested in polyrythmic music. I worked on multiple monitor installations in 1987-88 using 3 tapes and 9 monitors for a live musical performance. Each monitor was like a voice or a dancer, carefully choreographed and edited. Above, in live performance with the Percussions of Strasbourg in Nice, France in 1988.

9 monitor installation, ACM SIGGRAPH '89 Art Show
© 1989 Vibeke Sorensen

NLoops is 7 minute work based on polyrythmic musical structures translated into 2 and 3 dimensional computer animated form, in which complex time structures are built from phasings of abstract painted cycles. Music is composed by Rand Steiger of University of California at San Diego, and employs digital musical technology in realizing the score.

Nloops deals with the integration of intuitive, gestural elements of painting and abstract/procedural approaches to three dimensional computer animation. The work references the history of animation, including the zoetrope and variations as it is extended into the 3 and 4 dimensional world of the computer. Many of the objects result from mathematical relationships to the number of different frames (12 and 16) in each cycle of animation. The large black torus or "donut"for example, has 16 facets as a cross section and 16 "slices" around its central axis. Each successive frame of the animation cycle was assigned to side by side polygons on the surface of the torus, so that adjacent polygons in any direction are exactly one step out of phase, all the way around in all directions. When each polygon animates a complete cycle, the entire object and its surface appears to cycle in waves. Hardware and software include an IBM PC AT running Cubicomp Picturemaker and Lumena Paint software. It was produced at the California Institute of the Arts, with thanks to the Post Group in Los Angeles. NLOOPS has been exhibited at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the ACM SIGGRAPH '89 Art Show in Boston, the Post-Currents '89 Festival at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in its single channel version in 1989 at the MANCA New Music Festival in Nice, France and the Euro-Video Festival in Paris, and numerous other locations around the world.