Steve Turk and I did a lecture demonstration and workshop on Synchronous Objects yesterday focusing on what is happening now with the project coming back into the studio and into classrooms (in dance and architecture).

Ohio State architecture students working on installation projects using synchronous objects as a resource.

More on curricular developments at Ohio State next week.

Here in Hamburg it was a pleasure to take a step beyond the lecture format this week and to share with 20 workshop participants a movement laboratory based on the systems in “One Flat Thing, reproduced” and the process we experienced in the creation of Synchronous Objects, namely the iterative and reflexive, analytical and creative scoring of the dance. We did several simple improvisations that allow the group to construct networks of relationships (cues) and to experience forms of relationship in motion (alignments) without any dance training.

I’ll post a lesson plan on the blog some day soon and I invite teachers out there who are using the site in their classrooms to share your ideas with me as well and here on the blog.

Hamburg by the way is a beautiful city with a small town feel and big city culture. It must be gorgeous in the summer. The Kampnagel where the conference is held is a fantastic renovated industrial facility, one of many in Germany. -Norah

Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany

“We gathered our spatial data by tracking one point on video on each dancer throughout the entire dance. We used both the front and top view of the video to track this using special purpose software that we developed in house. This data was then organized as x,y,z locations over time per dancer. Then we provided this data in a number of formats, for use in visualization. We would reformat the data using code, to match whatever the visualization required. The Density surface maps in the Movement Density object were then created by reading in this data and generating it for every second of the dance. The geographers then output the results in a frame by frame basis, at 25fps.” -Maria Palazzi

And a note on interdisciplinary process: it was never this neat or orderly. In our experience, interdisciplinary collaboration requires a high tolerance emergent structure. The real discoveries in interdisciplinary knowledge transfer happen in the subtle moments of understanding that come within the chaos of working together, not unlike counterpoint. Our collaborators in Geography, Hyowon Ban and Ola Ahlqvist made 100s of different kinds of maps and we looked at all of them together and discussed them at length. We discussed the different interpolations and how they either revealed or obscured the data. We looked a issues of color and transparency. We spent time unpacking our terminologies and carefully defining the exact use of words like spatial data and attribute data. We discussed the issue of creating data from qualitative sources and shared differing disciplinary perspectives. But more than anything we came to the room each time with a healthy respect for the differences in our ways of understanding and our ways of making and doing and a sense of confidence that there were opportunities for agreement and interesting new alignments.

Keep your questions and interests coming, we love hearing from you.
Norah

1. Discovery-based pathway:
By design, there are many ways into the site and therefore many ways into understanding this dance and one great way to approach it is just to beginning clicking on images that interest you and follow your own path of discovery. As you do so, notice that every object includes a PROCESS CATALOG tab (on the left hand side of your screen). The process catalogs are small samplings of the hundreds of design ideas that we made during our research. They show you the visual thinking that goes into this kind of work and include comments from some of the makers. Every object also has key terms and a video of dance, and many include commentary and other features. You can click on the RELATED OBJECTS tab to move horizontally or you can always return home and let the objects slide by until you see something you like. Once you know what you’re looking for, the VIEW ALL OBJECTS link at the bottom of your screen will show you all twenty objects so you can easily get back to something you like.

2. Linear pathway starting with the dance
If you are someone who prefers a more linear pathway through the information then we suggest you begin where we began the project and that is with THE DANCE itself. In this full score interface you can view the dance in full, see our data as a moving score, hear commentary, and link to objects that will give you more visual information on specific aspects of structure in the dance. From THE DANCE we suggest you watch the ALLIGNMENT ANNOTATIONS and CUE ANNOTATIONS and click through some of the movement themes in the MOVEMENT MATERIAL INDEX. You’ll get a good feel for the dance and its systems of organization from those four objects. From there maybe you’ll want to look at some of the more abstract objects such as the DATA FAN or try out the tools, a user favorite is the COUNTERPOINT TOOL.

And finally, for some textual description, the introductory essays–the Dance, the Data, the Objects–explain each of the project’s core elements in more detail (the essays are available as pages here in the blog and under the introduction tab when you’re on the site).

These are a few ideas to start with, let us know if you’d like to hear more about a particular object or perhaps you have a pathway you’d suggest for others to follow. -nzshaw

We’ve also been sharing the project a lot at interesting venues and will continue to do so this summer including:

Spring Dance 2009, Utrecht, The Netherlands “Inside Movement Knowledge”
Sadler’s Wells, London, UK “Focus on Forsythe”
PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany “Exploration 09″
Society for Animation Studies Conference, Atlanta, USA “The Persistence of Animation”
SIGGRAPH 2009, New Orleans, USA “Information Aesthetics Showcase”

and more…

We’re also happy to be featured on one of our favorite sites, visualcomplexity.com

Sync/O is part of a symposium this week called Explorationen 09. It is a really interesting group of people and PACT is a great arts center set in the midst of a refurbished wash house for the coal miners who used to make up the majority of the population in Essen, Germany. The architects who did the refurbishing have left the original tiles, mirrors, soap holders, and other features of the space giving it a haunting feeling of uses from the past. Now it houses artist residencies, dance performances (to my delight this week was British choreographer Jonathan Burrows), and symposia focusing on off-beat and interdisciplinary perspectives. Being here has inspired me to (finally) begin working on my book about Synchronous Objects and the creative research methods it required. -Norah

Here are some thoughts from Matt:

MATT: In addition to making choreographic concepts more comprehensible to other disciplines, we are very interested in ways in which choreographic knowledge is useful in other contexts. Exposure to such ideas should provide new ways of seeing, communicating, and evaluating relationships among elements in complex dynamic systems. Having not had much exposure previously to contemporary dance, I now have a much greater awareness of its complexity and breadth of conceptual material. It’s intriguing to me that I see much richer relationships between dancers and their movements than I had before being introduced to these concepts.

Our design process made me consider that the choreography of attention, combined with disciplinary knowledge, can control what a viewer perceives. More specifically, it seems that new visual relationship concepts might change what can be seen. I’m still contemplating the relationship between what I think of as more “horizontal” alignments, and the more “vertical” processes of reduction and synthesis. As one might hope for in an academic environment, the project’s framework has emphasized this continuous inquiry, instead of seeking a single correct solution. It also has provided a unique model for collaboration between designers, artists, and scientists that should serve as a valuable benchmark for our projects in the future.

—Matthew Lewis, Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD)

“Engaging with Synchronous Objects as a choreographer, I was very interested in how choreographic thinking is a way of knowing that offers new insight into other fields from geography, to computer programming, to architecture. I was also interested in the ways that other fields shed light on my own choreographic practices and turn my understanding of choreography inside out. In the process of creating I seek to undo what I think I know choreography is so that I can be open to inventive ways of working. Interacting with the Synchronous Objects website is a chance to re-think what choreography is, from a series of actions, to an example of counterpoint, to a study of the responsibilities and dependencies among a group—and the list goes on.

Up-ending my assumptions of what choreography is has several practical consequences that are evident as I create in the studio. Using the Synchronous Objects’ Counterpoint Tool, for instance, invites me to play with new ways of organizing the movement of a group through space or relating my limbs to each other in surprising ways. Synchronous Objects has expanded what choreography can look like and act like, and this alone has had a significant impact on how I think about my choreographic process. From the work of the interdisciplinary team that came together to create Synchronous Objects I come away with an inspiring methodology for collaboration. Congregating around common interests from a variety of angles yields not only insight into each distinct field, but articulates areas where expertise overlaps. What would it mean for my process if I asked an architect or geographer to join in, incorporating their sense of space and place into my work? What would it mean for an architect to consult me on a crowd’s movement through space before she designed an atrium in a hotel lobby? Synchronous Objects invites me to broaden my definition of the choreographic act into other fields, and notice the many ways that actions are organized, be it in the editing room of a filmmaker, or on the drawing board of a city planner. With one foot in the studio, and the other in several diverse disciplines, I feel inspired to jump into making a new piece with the desire to look for choreography everywhere.” —Lillian Skove

We invite your comments and let us know if you’re using the site and if you’d like to contribute a post to the blog.
—Norah