In my course, I ask students to analyze One Flat Thing, reproduced and Synchronous Objects with the suggestion that the disciplines of dance and interior design share many parallel characteristics. Both are based on spatio-temporal conditions. Both are situated in perceptions of experience. Both use systems of organization to construct logic and creative play. Interior space making is functional, creative choreography. And the structure of a body is architecture in itself. It is a salient architectonic form that interplays with dimensions of space and time. Space itself is pliable, active and alive (paraphrased from Merce Cunningham’s video Points in Space). Breath and air are essential to the body and to the space, rendering each kinesthetically dynamic. The body in motion designs the space and the space navigates the body’s movements.

With these parallels in mind the students analyze the dance through the lenses offered in Sync/O and through their own analytical processes. They then conduct a series of transformation exercises to produce abstract spatial configurations, manually and digitally. The student models evoke the subtleties they saw in the dance. Here is a sampling from the projects completed in 2009:

This object by student Jeremy Escalera brings the collective network of communication in the dance and the spatial distribution to the forefront.

by Jeremy Escalera

By Lisa Schmidt

We understand through Synchronous Objects that alignments are essential to how visual relationships are constructed in the dance. In this project by Stephanie Payton alignments between the dancers become shifting landscapes of three dimensional surfaces. They create an independent architecture of form and flow.

by Stephanie Payton

I look forward to seeing what the students create this spring and will be happy to share the results again on the blog.” – Susan Melsop

One of the goals of our project is to place dance and choreographic knowledge at the center of other disciplinary discussions. This goal is an outgrowth of Forsythe’s experience with his earlier media object, the Improvisation Technologies CD-Rom which was taken up by architects as a creative and pedagogical tool when it was published in the 1990s. Architecture is once again showing an interest in the Sync/O project but we’ve also seen an expanded interest on the part of designers as evidenced by this Communication Arts feature but also by selection of our work for the SIGGRAPH 09 Information Aesthetics Showcase and features on the Information Aesthetics blog and on visualcomplexity.com. And in a nice bit of synergy, our guest contributor last week, Kristin McGuire suggests the connections between choreographic and design pedagogy.

So then, if we consider choreographic thinking to be an important site of knowledge for many contemporary concerns in other fields how do we continue to broaden the dialog? What about choreography as form of geographic thinking, a source of knowledge for urban planning, or an important resource in gestural interface design for things like Microsoft’s project Natal or new games for the wii? For those of us in dance this may seem clear. But how do we continue to communicate and to bridge the gaps? Thoughts?

–Norah

During spring quarter 2009 at the Ohio State University, the second year undergraduate architecture students participated in an Installation Studio which focused on William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced. This studio, which deals with material fabrication, notation and fundamental representational skills, is a required course for all second year architecture majors and thus eighty students divided into five sections were involved. Professor Stephen Turk, who taught one of these sections, describes the course:

“The installation studio is an annual design problem in which students are asked to take a design from an initial scheme to full size realization, producing all the documentation and providing all the labor necessary to build the work. This entails taking individually developed designs into a group construction phase which emphasizes the collaborative nature of architectural production, the complex problems of logistics and the coordination of many people’s efforts. Each year the installations are based upon research into a specific phenomenon and systems of mediation from related disciplines such as music, sculpture, painting and dance. In the past these have emphasized the architectural behaviors of light, sound and motion as students were asked to translate properties from one system of mediation to another, through notational, diagrammatic, material and formal exercises.

The specific nature of working with Forsythe’s choreographic work and the interdisciplinary nature of the Synchronous Objects project fit well with the traditional emphasis of the studio and offered the opportunity for the students to understand the working methods and critical thinking of another discipline. For the project, students were asked to carefully review the large amount of data provided by the web site to understand the underlying structures and systems within Forsythe’s choreography of One Flat Thing, reproduced. Having absorbed some of this information over the course of a week each student was asked to respond to this information by creating a design proposal, which would map these conditions into an analogous architectural construct. The intention was to produce a system that would register the complexity and structure of Forsythe’s dance and provide a spatial experience that recalled in an abstract and qualitative way both its temporal structures as well as its organizational system. The spatial experience would share characteristics with the preformative qualities of the dance and resonate with its conceptual thinking while working with newly emergent architectural qualities and material conditions within a specific site in our building. These sites already have a kind of latent choreographic set of behaviors related to the ways in which they are currently occupied and the way in which light, shadow, sound, view and other architectural conditions operate. These sites formed the basis of the second part of the project, but during this first phase the specifics of the sites were left relatively abstract to allow for an in depth investigation of the potentials of the choreographic structures to inform formal material and organizational behaviors in the proposed structure.

The logistical and organizational nature of architectural design and production shares many aspects with what might be considered choreographic thinking, as designers have to mobilize complex material processes and work through the issues of group dynamics to produce a structure in a limited amount of time. In many cases this is the first exposure that these students have had with the work of a contemporary choreographer and for most it is their first serious confrontation with the discipline of dance.“

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

Image from springy thingy by Mark Goulthorpe et al.

During our symposium to launch the project we featured the voices of the makers of Synchronous Objects including faculty from several disciplines as well as graduate student and staff researchers. We also invited two special outside guests who are familiar with Forsythe’s work to discuss how they think Synchronous Objects is relevant in their domains and perhaps more broadly. Each of them wrote posts for the e-symposium that you can read in full (see tags or categories to the right). But for this week, I will compile excerpts in shorter posts starting with Mark Goulthorpe. Mark is an architect at MIT who has collaborated with Forsythe in the past. For me, he represents some of the most interesting current trends in architecture including a well-established appreciation for process and performance, interest in surface and event, and a creative approach to the products of the trade. For more ways into these ways of thinking about architecture check out this beautiful blog Interactive Architecture. Many of these projects could be described as choreographic objects.

Mark is a fan of Forsythe’s work and describes dance as relevant to “all areas of cultural production.” He points to Forsythe’s use of “rule-based generative processes” that can be considered “within an historical lineage of similar intellectual projects in different cultural domains (Raymond Roussel/literature, James Joyce/literature, Antoni Gaudi/architecture, Jacques Derrida/philosophy, Paul Steenhuisen/music).” He also suggests that “emergent technologies nurture a new relational aptitude that Forsythe’s work seemingly instantiates.” And he asks us to consider the “expansion of creative praxis from an essentially deterministic and individual mode, that has dominated most established cultural fields for millennia, to one that prioritizes collective creative endeavor.” He finishes by saying “I regard Forsythe as an architect, albeit of the possibility of ballet at the threshold of a new technological paradigm…” This is one of the best things about working on this project with Bill, the way in which other disciplines can recognize themselves in dance/choreography.

For links to more on Mark’s work I like the Floating Points series here. And his more recent project Springy Thingy can be seen here.
—Norah Zuniga Shaw

I did not know much about dance before starting to work on this project. I have gained a great appreciation for what one might call the formal beauty of dance – the mathematical structures behind the interplay of dancers, and the geometry of motion. This in turn has helped my more visceral appreciation of dance as well as my understanding of related fields.
In the course of the project, I have had a chance to work with people from many different backgrounds, including dance, animation, computer science, geography, and architecture. Having such an interdisciplinary team has made for a very rich research environment.

When we were developing the interactive counterpoint tool, we tried several different systems in an effort to understand what visual counterpoint was, how it arose, and how best to explain it to others. (We had many discussions around this subject – trying to understand counterpoint from the perspectives of dance, animation and design, and computer science. These early conversations and experiments would be a good subject for another post.) I think the system we have today works well because it is based on simple rules, but has a structure with many opportunities for different kinds of alignments and symmetries. At the same time it is not too regular – the pattern of alignments is unpredictable.

The widget shapes in the tool are based on twelve “clock face” positions. The position for each widget arm is selected randomly from among the twelve. Widgets move from shape to shape within a set timing structure, with times for movement chosen from four different speeds, similar to musical quarter, half, dotted quarter, and whole notes.

Leaving aside movement around the “stage” for the moment, we can see many possibilities for interesting motion and alignments within this structure. Widgets might of course take on matching or symmetric shapes, or move in exactly the same direction at exactly the same speed, and this will happen irregularly due to the random choice involved in the process.

More interestingly, we might see widgets take on similar shapes which are not the same, or follow one another’s shapes with a slight delay, or take on shapes which are related but do not have strict symmetry. (I believe that the choice of twelve positions is a fortunate one – there are many pleasing symmetries within the clock face.) The timing system plays a big role here as we can see layers of shape alignment and speed alignment weave into and around each other.

Even within one creature we can see some small counterpoint. Perhaps two arms move together in one direction at the same speed, while the other arm moves in the other direction, twice as fast – then everything reverses and the arms take new roles. Perhaps two arms form a right angle and are still while the third moves slowly from an acute angle to form a “T”.

Motion about the stage is determined in a similar way, with positions and speeds chosen freely from a structured set. At this level we can work with larger groups of objects and watch for alignments in the way they move together.

The structure of the performing widget system lends itself well to contrapuntal motion. The sliders let us give broad choreographic direction to the widgets, encouraging more or less unison in shape, speed, or movement, or calling for more or less stillness. This gives the user a way to explore and traverse the space of motion, using it to learn and to construct beautiful counterpoint.