Catch Up
Created April 2023
This project was made possible through the production and technical support of the Movement Lab in the Milstein Center of Barnard College
This video, “Catch Up” is an exploration of synchresis, the juxtaposition of multimedia elements, to call upon soundscape, voice, body, and memory in an audio ethnography – mixing hazy dance with an audio montage of Paris, France, voice journals, and more.
The essay below brings this work into conversation with ideas outlined in the book Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, a French composer, film theorist, and scholar renowned for his pioneering work on the relationship between sound and image in cinema.
Chion’s ‘image of language’ and the meaning of language as places where the brain first goes point towards a great chasm between the effable and ineffable, as shaped by our perception of it. The relationships between dancing, music, technology, improvisation, and ethnography are of particular interest – how the spatial, temporal, and emotional relationships between these happenings change the nature of the art. It is a synchresis happening on and offscreen, and between those worlds in the temporal and spatial reimaginations that filming/documenting/sharing improvisational, immersive art evokes.
Dance is so ephemeral, and the kinesthetic empathy that intertwines performers and audiences is so bodily, yet the image of dance involves a translation of that content into form, in a similar way to language. I think dance has powerful potential as a language that is more fit for understanding ourselves and existence– the body can make spatial and visual occupations that are more fully engaging linguistic networks to live within, a physicality that can still fill chambers. Further, ‘the body’ itself is both a gigantic eye, ear, and instrument, amongst other things, which gives it a uniqueness that addresses the aforementioned chasm. These things come to mind as I think in conversation with Chion’s ideas of the ‘eye as more spatial, and ear as more temporal.’ The idea of visual microrhythms, and the (irr)reversibility of image and sound, compels me towards the intersections of technology and magic.
Perhaps it is compelling that synchresis, between all sorts of modes of being (what happens when we “rediscover” gustatorial, proprioceptive, vestibular, etc. senses in connective ways?). Here I am compelled towards the intersection of technology and magic, in understanding the infinite immersions, both nurtured and innate, that are synchresistic. What underlying truths can be revealed from synchresis? Which combos are slightly off-putting, seemingly forged from nothingness/randomness, or perhaps feel even more innate (and satisfying?) than the original sound-image relationship itself? This idea is reminiscent of, and a metaphor for, the multiplicities of realities interwoven with perception itself.
It may be especially uncanny to deconstruct and separate artistic outcomes of these mediums after their creation (technology can also supplant the original divide between mediums, instead of bringing them together supplementally). As Chion discusses regarding horror films – sometimes when sound and image give different information, the composite (reciprocity of added value) feeds a newness back onto itself. In terms of silence – when one records oneself dancing to music, it is most helpful to watch back the video silently, so that the flow of the music doesn’t supplant itself onto the image of dance. Likewise, I think of postmodern silent dances/dance films– so that sound doesn’t alter movement or perception.
Thus, to emulate the organic workings of perception, technology, as explored in this video, can stimulate our senses with synchresis of kinesthetic empathy, memory, and linguistic form with moving images, sounds, and environments.
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.