Chamber Structure and Wallcrossing in the Adhm Theory of Curves I

ADHM invariants are equivariant virtual invariants of moduli spaces of twisted cyclic representations of the ADHM quiver in the abelian category of coherent sheaves of a smooth complex projective curve X. The goal of the present paper is to present a generalization of this construction employing a more general stability condition which depends on a real parameter. This yields a chamber structure in the ADHM theory of curves, residual ADHM invariants being defined by equivariant virtual integration in each chamber. Wallcrossing results and applications to local stable pair and Gopakumar-Vafa invariants will be presented in the second part of this work.