:: divine sites/ sights: collective simulated synaethesia ::

performance Waterplace Park :: 5.28 9-10:30p

documentation CUBE2 :: 5.19 - 6.4

website www.pan-o-matic.com/niagara

Divine Sites/Sights: Collective Simulated Synaethesia is an ongoing project that explores the relationship between bodies, energy and place. The project is invested in the collective use of alternative tools and processes as a way to affect the energy of highly “charged” locations. These locations can be charged by several factors: historic trauma of either environmental or socio-political consequences, popular leisure destinations, dense commercial exchange, rapid industrial production, authoritative use, and unexplainable natural phenomena.

Pan-O-matic Laboratories has developed a procedure called “collective simulated synaesthesia” in the spirit of Olivier Messiaen, the avant garde French composer and synaesthete. The process begins by dowsing the measurement of one’s aura distance using simple L-rods. The rods cross when the dowser is at the critical boundary of the subject’s electromagnetic field or aura. The aura path is then demarcated with relevant artifacts, based on the site in which the divining is taking place. The distance is converted to a frequency using an equation based on the speed of sound in air. Once the correct frequency is calculated a correlating musical note is determined. (For example, if my aura distance converts to a frequency of 440HZ, the equivalent note is “A4”).

The next part of the procedure is to sing the subjects own frequency as a musical note around their aura path in order to recalibrate or self-synchronize the body. A baritone opera singer was employed to enact this step of the procedure. Using a tuning fork as a gauge, our singer was able to reproduce the exact frequency of the subject’s aura. After the singer circles the aura path, the subject is asked what color was evoked to complete the collective action.

For Provflux 2005, Pan-O-matic Laboratories would like to conduct our Collective Simulated Synaesthesia experiment at a divine site/sight in Providence. Waterplace Park, during a Waterfire event, is the probable sight, based on the previously stated site attributes (i.e. socio-political, commercial, phenomenological, etc). As an ongoing project we are interested in experimenting with a wide range of locations and demographics as a way to reevaluate/reassess empirical methodologies of collecting data. We refer to our process as “divine datamining” and attempt to produce alternate models of information retrieval and dissemination. As a participatory public initiative, the experiment confronts the power relations between doctor/patient, authority/subject as the intimate and confidential are propelled into the spectacle.

about the artists

Sarah Lewison was born in NYC and raised in the suburbs. She received an MFA in Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego in 2001, concentrating in video, media studies. Her situated performances and installation works utilize and comment upon distributed and vernacular forms of research and authorship as forms of social organizing. The ongoing project, "Eccentric Domain" involves the therapeutic collective dreaming of a tangible commons. She has taught at San Francisco State University Information Arts Department and Ithaca College (NY). She is nomadic corresponding editor for the Los Angeles-based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.
www.carbonfarm.us

Stephanie Rothenberg uses performance, installation and digital media to create solicitous interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Referencing corporate strategy, these situations merge popular forms of advertising and market research with participatory experiences involving role-playing and fantasy. Cultural conventions of time and efficiency, spirituality and tradition are fore-grounded through their juxtaposition with prescribed, streamlined systems. The convergence lends itself to a recoding of current perceptions of commodity culture, infusing the public-ness of both objects and sites with the unpredictable and the idiosyncratic. She is Assistant Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo.
www.pan-o-matic.com/portfolio

about Pan-O-matic (panoramic + automatic)

Pan-O-matic is invested in the public evaluation and potential collectivism of existing and future strategic efficiency systems. Operating out of the industrial shorelines of the Great Lakes Region, Pan-O-matic Laboratories host a diverse team of individuals including highly trained technologists, dowsing practitioners and interdisciplinary artists. As technologically mediated spaces and shrinking devices continue to overload our environment, Pan-O-matic seeks to expose and harness the potential of the idiosyncratic. CEO Jane de la Warr exclaims, “By channeling our autonomous natures, we possess the power to deliver ourselves from irrationally demanding systems. Everyone should have the opportunity to understand and act for the benefit of all life.”