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.