Sync Objects around the world

Chris Roman and Norah Zuniga Shaw demonstrating alignments in a panel discussion with architects and musicians in Beijing China this autumn 2010.

In the year since our launch Synchronous Objects continues to travel the world through workshops, lectures and exhibitions. Most recently students in Beijing participated in a workshop with Forsythe Company dancer Chris Roman and Sync/o creator Norah Zuniga Shaw. The next workshop is at ICK-Amsterdam in December 2010.

And in August of 2010 Synchronous Objects was shown in a new form as a commission of the ISEA Ruhr 2010 exhibitions in Essen Germany at PACT Zollverein. This exhibition, created by Norah Zuniga Shaw and titled “Synchronous Objects: Reproduced” was a multipart installation is a spatial and temporal re-imagining of its web-based antecedent.

For this new work, Zuniga Shaw stayed close to the conceptual foundations of the original while extending them into the architectural and experiential possibilities of an installation. Moving through three rooms, visitors encounter the deep structures of a dance and the generative ideas contained within. In the first room, large-scale video projections of the dance are presented in proscenium space. Quickly this shifts to the analytical perspective in the second room where a table from the live performance of the dance is the foreground for the animated traces of choreographic structure that reveal patterns of relationship and intention. And in the final room visitors enter the multidirectional space of counterpoint, the visitors’ combined choices, attention, and actions become the structural core of the work as they engage with an array of synchronous objects: visualizations synced in the 15 minute time span of the dance; responsive graphics with which they can construct their own choreographies; a 7-channel audio composition shifting the sound of the dancers’ motions and Forsythe’s voice around the room; and a paper proliferation of creative processes falling into the space to be read, left behind, or carried home.