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 Reading Room in Taipei with workshop participants

We had a great experience exhibiting Synchronous Objects at the Taipei Arts Festival alongside several of Forsythe’s choreographic objects. Also taught workshops for artists and engineers and enjoyed sharing these ideas with a broad range of intelligent, curious, and engaged arts audiences in Taipei. Next on the list are Bangalore, Tokyo, and New York.

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.

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.

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

enjoy – nzshaw

“Synchronous Objects was the subject of the second lecture within a trilogy, which developed ideas from the “choreographic algorithm” to the “choreographic object” to the “choreographic construction”. All 3 lectures revolved around the work of William Forsythe.

The lecture series started with the analysis of Improvisation Technologies, which provided a rich database of dance operations and instructions. I found that they could be used in order to define a choreographic algorithm and as such create a dance piece. An algorithm is defined as a precisely described set of instructions.

The 3rd year dance students were asked to “fax” a ballet creating a simple choreographic algorithm based on the instructions/operations shown in the Improvisation Technologies CD. The remark of the architect Britta Callsen who had used Improvisation Technologies as an inspiration for her own project led me to my third lecture titled: Dance is Architecture in Motion. About the shared vocabulary of seemingly opposite art forms. Choreography and architectural planning as fundamental principles of organisation. Her remark is very insightful when it comes to analogies between architecture and dance:

“As an architect I sit in front of my computer, I click through the different menus of the CD and I get overwhelmed by a glaring similarity to the interface of my CAAD program.” (Britta Callsen 1995) When I asked her to name the similarities she responded: “With the CAAD program I construct a building with lines, polygons, circles which are basic geometric figures. I click the command ‘line’ to define two points and I draw a line between them. In order to view it in the right position I take the line and turn, twist, flip it in the virtual space. It is the same operation Forsythe demonstrates on his CD when he describes the relationship between parts of the body in motion.”

During this lecture the students were asked to develop a choreographic construction using orthographic drawings of a building (see image below). As they were keen to “manifest” those constructions in a dance piece they created work based on those constructions, which turned out to be very exciting material.

Example of a choreographic construction

Synchronous Objects was the subject of the second lecture in between the two I have just described. The idea of the choreographic object as Forsythe describes it seemed to sit well in between a choreographic algorithm – a well-defined yet clear and simple mathematical structure – and a choreographic construction – a complex, multi-layered, 4-dimensional construction of kinetic events.

Synchronous Objects was a real eye-opener to my students who said that they had never come across anything like that. Since knowing this tool they take their dance pieces apart and reassemble them on timelines; they develop cueing systems for their dancers; they look at the dance floor as a map etc. Since looking at the science inside One flat thing, reproduced they have become researchers of their own creative practical work.

Apart from the impact that Synchronous Objects had on my students I can say for myself that it clarified and thus resolved a contradiction of concepts about dance in my own mind. It made me realise that dance has left the dramatic performing arts world, which is still based on narratives. Choreography in my eyes is DESIGN as opposed to performing arts and it would be worth piloting an academic project based on a design syllabus rather than on a performing arts/drama syllabus.

Who is up for joining me on that?”

– Kristin McGuire

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.“

1. THE SCREEN MACHINE:
Project team: Ross Hamilton, Heather Brandenburg, Sarah Simeon, Minyoung Kim.
The Screen Machine is an installation that reveals and conceals the body. The Screens are made to reconfigure an open space, thereby inviting new pathways for people to move. Beyond reconfiguring the space, the screens perceptually reconfigure the body, as onlookers peering into the screens or gazing from a distance perceive a fragmented body as they catch sight of pieces and parts of the human form through open slits in the screens. The placement, size and design of the slits were determined by examining the cues in One Flat Thing, reproduced.

Ross Hamilton describes his intentions and methods in creating The Screen Machine:

“In researching the dance, I chose to focus on the interactions between the dancers that occur in the form of cues. These cues occur throughout the dance in various frequencies. As I moved away from looking directly at the connections between dancers, I began to focus on the number of dancers interacting within a certain time frame. I placed the time frames of the dance into various levels of density. I then used multiple patterns to describe these differing levels. These patterns were then used to create screens of varying porosity by translating the density of interaction within the dance to change the amount of the human figure visible through the screen. This reflects the “blurring” of the individual human figure which we perceived as occurring in the dance.”

2. CUBES:
Project team: Robert Scott, Jason Lee. Caleb Chamberlain, Emily Wright, Sameer Sharif

Cubes is an installation of performative objects, created for users to assemble and reassemble, discovering new alignments between slots cut into the sides of each module. As a system of combinatorial elements, Cubes also explores counterpuntal relationships in the space between the body of the user and the placement of a cube. Cubes was inspired by Forsythe’s use of counterpoint in One Flat Thing, reproduced, as the project team looked for moments of counterpoint in the placement, spacing, and orientation of the cubes.

Robert Scott describes his intentions and methods in creating Cubes:
“The analysis of the dance began with a study of movement and shoulder alignments. This data was then combined to form a new diagram in which the alignment lines transected the movement pixels. These pixels became voxels, and became the primitive units for the installation. I then studied the alignments and contrapuntal relationships of the dancers. These relationships form the system by which the primitives are organized. The voxels are free to be moved by visitors who essentially re-choreograph the dance with each movement. The stacks of voxels move from foreground to background, and as they move, visitors will notice alignments and contrapuntal relationships between cubes that are spread throughout the installation.”

3. PAPER CLIPS:

Project Team: Jeff Anderson, Lauren Miller, Sally Cejauskas, Avery Brooks

Papers Clips is an installation that examines the absence and presence of motion, measuring the density of an action inscribed in a space overtime. Examining the entrances and exists in a 5-second section of One Flat Thing, reproduced, Jeff Anderson and his team created a map that charted the absence of a movement as a dancer exited the performing area. The strands of hanging paper clips hung above the visitors to the installation, vary in length depending on the density of movement at that particular second in the dance.

Jeff Anderson describes his intentions and methods in creating Paper Clips:

“I began my project by analyzing the different objects on the Synchronous Objects website. The design plots the change in dancer position over time at five-second intervals for the entire dance. This created an object reminiscent of a DNA strand, and I began to analyze it and pick pieces out of it. Eventually I created a diagram of the absence over time of each dancer from the performance. This formed the gradient upon which I based the rest of my project. I wanted to apply the gradient sensation to a hanging material, and I settled on chains of paper clips. I took apart the gradient I had made into different pieces and mapped the density in the gradient through space.”

Dr. Sheila Marion and PhD students in the department of dance recently discussed Sync/O in Marion’s History, Theory, and Literature of Movement Analysis course. Norah Zuniga Shaw was invited to present Sync/O in this course because Marion sees this project as an important contribution to today’s current graphic representations of dance. Last week I returned to the class to ask the students about their impressions of Sync/O in relation to their own PhD research.

Michael Morris, whose interest in the project lies in how it represents the body, spoke of how Synchronous Objects sparked questions for him about the absence and presence of embodiment.

Mara Penrose is currently researching what can be expressed in labanotation’s graphic system, exploring how it can be re-designed to be less of a symbol and more akin to the expressive qualities of the movement. She is inspired by the annotations and alignments and the expressive quality of the animated lines drawn on One Flat Thing, reproduced, and how they give clear information about the direction and flow of the movement.

Veronica Dittman spoke about her interest in the project’s ability to present a way of learning how to literally see dance, as she is concerned with the accessibility of the dance field and in connections between dance and cognitive science.

Jessica Zeller, who uses Synchronous Objects in her dance history general education requirement course for 100s of undergraduates, added that the project is a powerful teaching tool especially for students who are new to dance and just beginning to learn how to perceive movement.

Karl Rogers spoke about how the project relates to other fields and calls into question the stereotype of the dance field as an insular isolated art form.

Merissa Nesbit, a student in the art education department, is investigating the embedded value systems in the vocabulary that teachers use in their classrooms, and she is interested in the value system embedded in One Flat Thing, reproduced and how it is communicated through the terminology used to describe and present the work.

As a group we talked about how Sync/O asks you to look at ‘how to look at’ a dance, and the plurality of different ways of looking at Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced is one of the uses of the project.

We’ve also enjoyed hearing from educators and students outside of OSU about the project and in our upcoming new blog interface we will have an educator’s area just for this thread of discussion.
–Lillian Skove