[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/77089477[/vimeo]

Einstein Dreams Time Conditioning Open Studio-Lab

The Topological Media Lab invite’s you to visit Einstein’s Dreams, time-conditioning installations, at the Concordia Hexagram-Blackbox. For 4 weeks, the Hexagram Blackbox will be transformed into a sandboxfor altering senses of time. Over the course of the month, visitors are invited to encounter this studio-workshop as a prototype for atelier process as a mode of knowledge creation, and knowledge creation as play.

Einstein’s Dreams is a research workshop that brings to bear ten years of media magic with realtime video, sound, lighting that evolve in concert with people’s movement.

In this workshop, inspired by vignettes from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams, we will culminate environments that condition temporality. In one, time slows to a halt as you approach a particular place; in another there is no future; in third, time sticks and slips; in a fourth age reverses and what is rotten becomes fresh as time passes.

Director and choreographer Michael Montanaro, Chair of Contemporary Dance, Canada Research Chair New Media Sha Xin Wei, team with media artists and researchers in the Topological Media Lab — a lab for making new kinds of hybrid mediamatter,

Join us for the Open Studios April 3,4,5!

This studio-workshop is free and open for visit to the Concordia community.

You’re welcome to visit us upon RSVP for our afternoon Tastings and Debriefings, Mondays through Fridays at the end of the afternoon, around 4:00 PM, March 18 through April 2, 2013. Please sign up by emailing Katerina Lagassé, katerina.lagasse@concordia.ca.

For more details and to follow the project: http://einsteindreams.weebly.com

Contact

Visitors should check via email with the event information officer:

Katerina Lagassé, katerina.lagasse@concordia.ca

cc. michael.montanaro@concordia.ca, xinwei.sha@concordia.ca

Scenarios :

– Scatter / gather : Your shadow splits. The shadows run way from you. The shadows quiver with tension & intention.

– Freeze :Deposit snapshots of yourself. Use “flash” timing: charging increase in tension. Snap!

– Sutures : The world is fissured, and sutured: as you walk you see/hear into discontinuous parts of the room.

– Motion, oil slick, molasses : Every action is weighted down, slooooooowwwweeedd asymptotically but never quite stilling. Every action causes all the pieces of the world to slide as if on air hockey table, but powered so they accelerate like crazy.

– Blur wind : Fray actions, images, sounds into noise

– Vortex, dizzy: Spin the world — every linear movement or “line” of sound becomes drawn into a giant vortex, that sucks into the earth. or reverse.

– Brittle, crack: Need to step carefully. If not, hear and see pending catastrophe: cracking ice underfoot …Or sometimes pure acoustic in darkness or whiteout strobe.

– Stasis ( hot or cold ): Sitting in the bowl of the desert (Sahara or Himalayas)

– Repetition: Visual — take video from a given location, but send to multiple locations

– Infection / Dark Light: Use video, e.g. use particles — thickened as necessary — as sources of light. Cluster around movement or around bodies presence as source of light.