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Sync Objects Installation in New York City

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:15:37 +0000

Gallery Installation Opens Feb. 2 at the Wyoming Building, #5 E. 3rd Street from 6-8pm.

We are in New York City for the final installation of Synchronous Objects: Degrees of Unison, a multi-part video and sound installation that we created using elements of our original online work and re-imagining them in space and time.

Unlike the web-based work, this installation gives an immersive and simultaneous experience of several objects. The sounds of the dancers and Bill Forsythe’s voice move through the space around you as you view 7 different visualizations playing out in sync in the 15 min time frame of the dance. For this installation we arranged the screens in a ring shape that is viewed from within. We’ve also done it as a forest of smalls screens at PACT in Germany and as large abstractions in a giant warehouse at the Taipei Arts Festival in Taiwan.

Synchronous Objects: Degrees of Unison installation at the Taipei Arts Festival

Andre Lepecki has also worked with the Goethe Institute NYC to organize an interesting symposium on the nature of the object in relation to performance in which Norah Zuniga Shaw will present Synchronous Objects and Forsythe’s concept of Choreographic Objects. We’re very interested in the perspectives of so many artists and scholars coming together and it is open to the public to listen in.

Here’s a link to more info:
http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/objects-in-performance/

See you!
Norah

Synchronous Objects still touring

admin — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:29:37 +0000

Synchronous Objects is still on the road showing up in cities far and wide from Beijing to Chicago and Zagreb to Bangalore. Of course you can always see it any time, any where online but The Goethe Institute has also made Synchronous Objects the subject of their Forsythe Module.

Curated by Petra Roggel, the Forsythe Module helps to share the work of Forsythe in locations not typically visited by the Company. We are doing this by exhibiting Synchronous Objects in a variety of installation formats: everything from working kiosks and interactive reading rooms like we did at the Wexner Center, Columbia College, SIGGRAPH etc. to immersive video installations that re-imagine the screen-based work in space and time as we did at ISEA-Rhur 2010 and will do next week at BADCo’s Symposium on choreography and software in Zagreb, Croatia and this summer at the Taipei Dance Festival alongside a large selection of Forsythe’s installation works.

Norah Zuniga Shaw (project co-creative director with Forsythe and Maria Palazzi) travels with the exhibitions to give public lectures and conduct interdisciplinary workshops. In 2010 the Goethe Institute sent Shaw and Synchronous Objects to the Tanzplatform and ISEA-Rhur 2010 in Germany and to Beijing, Taipei, and Tokyo. 2011 finds us in Croatia, Hungary, Turkey, Romania, India, Taiwan, Japan, New York City, Brazil, and beyond. Hope to see you around.

Synchronous Objects in Hamburg

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:11:39 +0000

It has been a good week of exchange and discourse about the work at the http://www.tanzkongress.de/ in Hamburg.

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

Synchronous Objects Updates and Presentations

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:27:41 +0000

We are hard at work during the month of July refining the site and making some small additions. In the coming weeks look for some upgrades on the popular Counterpoint Tool and in our full score interface called The Dance. Also look for more ways to interact with and share content. And do let us know if you’re finding oddities or bugs.

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 at PACT Zollverein

admin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:57:40 +0000

Photo: Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion

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

Sync/O Research as Teaching Laboratory

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:08:53 +0000

Another great contribution from graduate student Lily Skove:
At the Ohio State University, The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) is a unique space for the convergence of distinct fields. Perhaps “collision” of distinct fields would be a more apt description, as “convergence” suggests easeful assimilation. Collaboration as collision necessitates the full force of each fields’ identity, traditions, and expertise entangling to create something new, and this is how I would describe ACCAD’s latest conquest, Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced. Working as a student on this project gave me the unique vantage point of observing and engaging experts at work in cross-disciplinary investigation. It is difficult to learn in classroom settings about the nature of collaboration across disciplines, how to set them up, how to guide investigation, create space for distinct expertise and find areas of common ground, and so on. Seeing Synchronous Object’s collaboration in practice and being invited to play an active role in the project’s process, has given me new tools to think about my own research. I think that this project offers a successful model for universities that want to teach their students about how to conduct collaborative research and initiate dialogue across disciplines. It goes without saying that the graduate students on the creative team that made Synchronous Objects achieved a level of intimacy with the project that afforded them new insights and deepened their own learning, but Synchronous Objects created many opportunities for students across the Ohio State University campus to come into contact with the project at various stages of it’s development. For instance, the dance department organized several entry points for the students into this project, such as the “Creative Research Consortium” that explored the project’s themes offering new ideas that were then folded back into the work of the core research team. Currently the architecture department is offering a course that uses Synchronous Objects as a jumping off point for new discovery in their field. As Synchronous Objects circulates in the Ohio State University community, it fosters a desire for new collaborations as people in various fields meet for the first time, and as the departments on campus are re-envisioned not as separate camps of knowledge but as resources for each other. ACCAD offers itself as a meeting place both literally and figuratively on the university map for all of us searching for a collision of interests, and a nurturing environment for hybrid projects.

Matt Lewis on the Choreography of Attention

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:00:36 +0000

Matt Lewis is a computer scientist and collaborator on Synchronous Objects. His work in generative drawing was an inspiration for the generative drawing tool available on the site. If you have not played with this tool yet, give it a try, it uses data from the dance to drive the motion of the “paint brushes” and create interesting animations and ultimately drawings. Let us know what you think! –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)

Laban and Dance History in relation to Sync/O: Student Perspectives

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:14:08 +0000

Mara Penrose, an MFA student, and Hannah Kosstrin, a PhD student in the dance department at the Ohio State University, offer insights about Synchronous Objects from the perspective of Labanotation and dance history in a recent interview with graduate student Lily Skove.
Lily Skove: Can you speak to your interest in Labanotation in relation to Synchronous Objects?
Mara Penrose: Systems of annotation represent the movement they describe. Therefore, dance notations need to be specific to the piece itself and the intended audience. The question is, to use a valuable word offered by this project, “traces,” what kind of traces are appropriate for the work? Synchronous Objects’ purpose is not to reconstruct One Flat Thing, Reproduced using Labanotation or some other form of dance notation. I see Synchronous Objects as a generative and creative new construction of One Flat Thing, Reproduced. Translation of a dance can take many forms, and what is of interest to me is the way that my knowledge of One Flat Thing, Reproduced is deepened through Synchronous Objects. Alva Noe in his talk during the Forsythe Symposium held at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio spoke to the project as a model for understanding, and this got me thinking about how Rudolf Laban created notation as a model for understanding as well. The intention behind Laban’s notation and Synchronous Objects has parallels: both aim to discover new theories or ways of perceiving a dance.
Lily Skove: How do you view the Synchronous Objects as a dance historian?
Hannah: I am interested in looking at Synchronous Objects from within the trajectory and scope of William Forsythe’s entire body of work. In previous projects and particularly in this one, my attention shifts from the work itself to the process of making the work. The tools on the Synchronous Objects’ website help to expose not only the structure of One Flat Thing, Reproduced but the principles that guided Forsythe and interested him choreographically. Counterpoint, alignments, and cueing systems are aspects of the dance that I understand as pliable and flexible principles that could take many forms, from One Flat Thing, Reproduced, to the Data Fan (computer generated imagery). Synchronous Objects invites dialogue about the process of making, and coming from a historical perspective, this dialogue enriches my understanding not only of Forsythe’s pieces but his methodology.

Lillian Skove on re-thinking choreography

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:43:32 +0000

I have invited collaborators on the project to periodically contribute to the blog describing their roles and interests in relation to Sync/O. This post is written by one of our graduate students in dance and tech, Lillian Skove:

“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

Using and Sharing Sync/o

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:20:30 +0000

After being in Europe for a week and sharing the project at Spring Dance and in the Sadler’s Wells “Focus on Forsythe” festival of events, our interest in sustained dialog about the project continues. What happens after the initial introduction? Which objects draw different people in which ways? We hear often from choreographers that the counterpoint tool captures their interest. It was great to hear in london from people in the audience who already knew the project, like professor Sarah Rubidge who shared her interest in the generative drawing tool (one of our favorites). It was also nice to share the video abstraction tool with a young dance / tech presenter from Norway who wanted to explore patterns in her own work. We’d love to know more. Be in touch here on the (blog) or on twitter, we tweet collectively as https://twitter.com/SyncObjects and I tweet as nzshaw.
—Norah