Purpose
The main scientific goal of this Residency is to gain insight into (1) temporal texture via relational (not ego-centered) productions of correlated patterns of dynamics and change, and (2) transitions in continuous, multivalent states and embodied agency.
Art production is a means but not the end of this Synthesis residency. By art we mean the poetic — and poetically precise — conditioning of experience.
Scientific goals:
(1) Write up each day, each week, and at the end of the residency, insights into, or refinements of the Core Motivating Questions (below) in your own terms.
(2) By the end of the residency, design experiments that Synthesis Center might co-host in Fall 2014 or Spring 2015 in ASU or elsewhere.
The practical goals are to
(1) Bring together some ensembles* that have advanced techniques to share with other experts, and
(2) carry out an experiment in improvisation using your apparatus while resident in the AME iStage blackbox which is being renovated.
The strategic goal and value for the Synthesis Center and the School of Arts, Media + Engineering is to host the building of an apparatus, which means not only equipment and software, but also people -- students + faculty + technical staff -- knowing how to keep using it in creation research beyond the workshop. (Participants from the Topological Media Lab will bear the main responsibility for leaving behind a working apparatus as a sibling to the Ozone responsive environments apparatus at Concordia, in order to facilitate subsequent research collaborations.)
Experts in the art and science of responsive environments will teach each other how to use some of the essential parts of our systems.
Art production is a means but not the end of this Synthesis residency. By art we mean the poetic — and poetically precise — conditioning of experience.
Scientific goals:
(1) Write up each day, each week, and at the end of the residency, insights into, or refinements of the Core Motivating Questions (below) in your own terms.
(2) By the end of the residency, design experiments that Synthesis Center might co-host in Fall 2014 or Spring 2015 in ASU or elsewhere.
The practical goals are to
(1) Bring together some ensembles* that have advanced techniques to share with other experts, and
(2) carry out an experiment in improvisation using your apparatus while resident in the AME iStage blackbox which is being renovated.
The strategic goal and value for the Synthesis Center and the School of Arts, Media + Engineering is to host the building of an apparatus, which means not only equipment and software, but also people -- students + faculty + technical staff -- knowing how to keep using it in creation research beyond the workshop. (Participants from the Topological Media Lab will bear the main responsibility for leaving behind a working apparatus as a sibling to the Ozone responsive environments apparatus at Concordia, in order to facilitate subsequent research collaborations.)
Experts in the art and science of responsive environments will teach each other how to use some of the essential parts of our systems.
* An ensemble is a set of technology, people, and techniques : e.g. software frameworks, instruments, devices, plus practitioners, makers, researchers, employing techniques and approaches, all co-refined together working over several projects under a family of related artistic expressions, conceptual questions or philosophical investigations. [Simondon, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques, 1958.]
Core Motivating Questions
Afternoons. Temporal Textures: Rhythm Studies
• How can people moving in concert get a sense of each other's presence and dynamics using rhythm alone?
• How can a conventionally unidimensional rhythm be extended to a temporal texture.
• How can people moving in concert anticipate each other's dynamics without superficial representations via sound or light image?
• How can correlation be an indicator (not certificate) of collective intention?
• How can a conventionally unidimensional rhythm be extended to a temporal texture.
• How can people moving in concert anticipate each other's dynamics without superficial representations via sound or light image?
• How can correlation be an indicator (not certificate) of collective intention?
Mornings. Transition and State
Given a continuously evolving state-based environment, how can transitions be detected or articulated with people moving in concert with multi-dimensionally parametrized media? How can we understand this without reference to a particular set of parameters? (This may be analogous to coordinate-free or "intrinsic" representations in differential geometry.)
Conditions
• Think of situations for three (3) or more people to avoid ego-based theories and media design. Ideally we should move beyond couples to avoid getting stuck in conventions about dyadic interaction. (Corollary: No "turn-taking" design.) "Interactive media" typically is media slaved to the actions of one body's activity. Instead, code your media to respond to inter-personal or better, field-like data that is NOT hard-wired to data coming from just the human bodies in the room. (Corollary: No blob tracking.)
• Invent exercises that do not merely depend on multi-modal media design. The design of sound, lighting, video, furniture splits the whole experience into technical dimensions.
• Instead focus on the rhythmic, or temporal textural quality of the experience that we can condition using our media or scenography. Rhythm cuts across sense modalities. Rhythm, and more generally temporal textures are phenomenological qualities, not sense data.
• Invent exercises that do not merely depend on multi-modal media design. The design of sound, lighting, video, furniture splits the whole experience into technical dimensions.
• Instead focus on the rhythmic, or temporal textural quality of the experience that we can condition using our media or scenography. Rhythm cuts across sense modalities. Rhythm, and more generally temporal textures are phenomenological qualities, not sense data.