In this Synthesis Lighting and Rhythm Residency (LRR), faculty and student researchers the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and the School of Electrical Engineering at ASU and the Topological Media Lab in Montreal come together in the Matthews Center iStage to create movement-based studies exploring how people create meaningful movement through rhythm and coordinated activity.
Continuing its investigations from Improvisational Environments Residency Spring 2014, Synthesis brings together researchers motivated by parallel inquiries in movement and temporality: the sense of dynamic, change, rhythm. Researchers combine techniques from dance, computational sound, animated lighting, and machine perception to create living environments in a theatrical space in which to explore sense of time and rhythm as a fundamental mode of experience. During the LRR, Synthesis students and researchers will create various scenarios and games with movement in fields of lighting that respond to people’s movement, in response to the questions motivating these working sessions: • How can we modulate one's (not a spectator's) sense of dynamic, change, temporal texture using lighting? • How can people and room collectively retrospect and anticipate action? • What is the minimum signal needed to orient bodies' movements to one another? • How can moving bodies signal one another concurrently, and still manage collective anticipation or retrospection, or improvisatory variation? |
In parallel responses to those questions:
(1) Movement artists will create the movement etudes with and without music. (2) Media artist-programmers will create behaviors for realtime lighting instruments to modulate the field of light in the room or on people’s bodies in concert with people’s activity. (3) Human activity analysts will observe and talk with the dancers and media-programmers at work in studio sessions, and identify or create other tools for analyzing the phenomena of anticipation and retrospecton in ensemble experience. This fundamental research will continue from Nov 17 through 25. Although there will be no “performance” or “demo,” visitors are welcome to drop by the Matthews Center iStage to casually witness this research-creation process. Times — tentatively 3-5 PM Monday through Friday — will be posted on the LRR website. Please contact Kristi Garboushian for more information. How does a group of musicians or dancers improvising together “decide” to change all at once? How does a musician playing with an ensemble recall past musical themes and join in at just the right moment? How does a person hurrying through a crowded airport or train station weave in between other hurrying pedestrians and moving walkways to get to her destination? How does a person rowing a canoe down a whitewater river rapids anticipate the rushing waters and adjust her action based on what she has been doing and what she may encounter? |
Faculty Coordinators:
Sha Xin Wei, Phenomenological science and quotidian activity Chris Ziegler, Artistic architecture and dance experiments |
Contact
Chris Roberts, Research Operations Manager, LRR Project Lead Kristi Garboushian, Communications Coordinator |