I chanced upon an art installation, a video seeking to decipher movement. The piece enhances and recreates the beauty of one piece of art into another similar, but different, thing entirely. “Synchronous Objects,” a three-year-long project at the Ohio State University, takes choreographer William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000)” and digitally dissects it, producing video-ized creations that reveal, destroy and reassemble the beautiful dance into a new aesthetic entity, one that retains the values of movement and renders it through the prism of the computer into a beautiful new thing.
One that reminds us that we move. Constantly.
We move muscles hidden beneath layers of skin, which instantaneously take and execute orders from our brains. Millions and millions of signals repeated infinitely yet uniquely to get us out a door or into the water. We caress, shove, pull, grab, rub, jump, throw. We masticate and gesticulate. We digest our food. At this moment, you and I move our fingers across plastic keys, pushing each one down separately, our brain arranging the order of movement to make words appear on a computer screen in front of us.
Movement defines us in the world as physical beings.
Movement is pre-language. When we watch movement — a ballet dancer lifted above a partner’s head, a sprinter nearing the finish line — it is felt first. Our viewing of human movement connects us to each other without using the cerebrum. It is pure brain stem. It is the stuff of flee-or-fight. To watch movement is almost to move ourselves; when I see you move, I twitch. I want to move.
Technology conspires to plant us. So, our modern world invents ways to move. We run races or climb mountains or play games. Movement has become unnecessary for survival. In fact, there are those among us capable of little or no movement: paraplegics and quadraplegics who live a life outside of physicality. Before civilization, such immobile humans would have been abandoned to the elements, dying either violently or just wasting away.
Movement is incorporated in our essence. We admire it when it glides and pushes and arranges itself it ways that tell us stories, in a manner that digs into who we are as humans.
Most studies of movement decipher the science of it. Most practictioners of movement create and explore the beauty or the power of it. Sports kinesiologists break down an athlete’s moves, finding flaws and removing resistance until the task at hand becomes streamlined. A baseballer uses his muscles, eyes and brain to create the coordinated swinging of a rounded bat connecting with a speeding, thrown ball within the space of one, single second.
“Synchronous Objects” delineates the beauty of the movement, deconstructing its parts and patterns. It is mesmerizing. To watch such a thing outside of ourselves — meaning, that it is “real” and made for all of us — is as if the artistic team plucked from my head many of my different ways of seeing. It is as if the act of watching a ballet — or game — or kids running around in the yard — is now imbued externally with the sublime nature of subconscious thoughts.
The piece is at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, N.C., as part of the “Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern” through January 2, 2012.
- greg rideout
Look, I’m going to vote for Obama. You are, too. Corporatist, sure. Picking off people with drones — yes, true. But also: health care. And, end war in Iran, Afghanistan. And Gay Marriage, well, there’s some leadership and also the abortion rights stay protected. 
