April 2, 2009

Exploring William Forsythe's "Synchronous Objects" Website

As I mentioned yesterday, the dance visualization website "Synchronous Objects" is now open. It's an impressive, extensive and unique resource.

Synchronous Objects is a joint project of choreographer William Forsythe and Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance. This project aims to create a new set of data visualization tools for understanding and analyzing the underlying structures and relationships of Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (2000).

It will take me a week or more to explore the Synchronous Objects website. There is a lot to digest and it is a bit overwhelming.

In this post, I'd like to share how I'm progressing through this visualization website so I can figure out how it works and how all of the pieces fit together. Hopefully, my approach will work for others.

Get Adobe Flash

You'll need the latest version of Adobe Flash to access Synchronous Objects. If you don't have it installed, you'll be prompted to download it.

Introductory Screen for Viewing Visualizations

Once you select "Enter Fullscreen" or "Enter Windowed" viewing mode, click on "View All Objects" at the bottom center of the screen. You will be presented with the following menu for viewing the different parts of the Synchronous Objects website.

My recommendation is that you start with the four objects with a blue-colored theme on the left-hand side.

Alignment Annotations

Visit Alignment Annotations.

In "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (OFTr), "Alignments are short instances of synchronization between dancers in which their actions share some, but not necessarily all, attributes." The objective is to use visualization tools to highlight the spatial and temporal patterns of the dancers.

There are three types of alignments: analogous shapes, related timings and corresponding directional flows.

To learn a bout alignments, you can watch an explanatory video and watch three annotated videos. You can watch these annotations of alignments with graphics overlaid over the dancers or just the graphics alone. Here's a screen shot from the explanatory video:

Cue Annotations

Visit Cue Annotations.

The Cue Annotations document and visualize how dancers give and receive visual cues to and from each other throughout OFTr. A cue is an indication that one or more dancers can initiative a specified movement phrase.

You can watch an explanatory video and watch four annotated videos (with dancers and annotations, or just cue annotations alone) . The following screen shot is from one of the cue-annotated videos:

Movement Material Themes

Visit Movement Material Themes.

In this visualization object, you will find videos of twenty-five movement themes and structured improvisations that are repeated and combined throughout OFTr. For each theme and improvisation, you can watch both a close-up shot and a regular shot. There is also an explanatory video that describes the work's movement material:

The Dance with Full Video Score

Visit The Dance with Full Video Score.

You can view a video of OFTr with or without the full video score. The visual score allows you to see on a timeline how the interconnecting elements--cues, sync-ups (a type of alignment) and movement material themes--relate to each other at any given moment in time. Plus, you can see the role played by each dancer in this complex, counterpoint puzzle.

On the right-hand side of the visual score, you'll see that you can determine the viewing angle (top or front), turn on or off the annotation overlays, and listen to different audio tracks (Forsythe commentary, ambient sounds and the music score). Here's a screen shot of the dance video with the movement score:

I'm very curious to learn what readers think about this dance visualization project. Once I have a better understanding of how the different pieces work, I'll share my thoughts.

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