Atlas of Smooth Spaces

1. Theoretical framework In this artistic research project we explore how to notate, communicate and compose space phenomena across audio-corporeal artistic practices. We investigate these in four disciplines: Dance, Rhythmics, Choir Conducting and Direct Sound. They share an awareness for a certain tacit knowledge about space. In stark contrast to musical or movement notations, one finds that notated spaces are rather scarce in the audio-corporeal practices even though space unites them. We argue that this lacuna will be brigded by working on an atlas of space qualities. Rather than communicating merely the metric measures of spaces without the performer, we are concerned instead with emergent spatial qualities of smooth spaces that complement the performer, that exist outside of but not without the performer. 2. Hypotheses / Research questions / Objectives We will compare and contrast each of the four disciplines with one another to investigate how to intensify spatial phenomena, how to translate and communicate them, how to appropriate them for ones own practice and how to engage into mutual composition. We inquire about the kinetic spheres of two performers when a third one enters. Similar to the three-body problem in physics we seek to describe this emergent phenomena. How can the complexified spatial interactions of the kinespheres be notated? How saturated becomes the space, how fragmented, how synchronous? 3. Approach /Methods We conduct experiments during which a smooth space phenomenon is first distilled and condensed to a clear spatial expression. This we call the null-space. It is the starting point for our investigations and experiments, which are co-created in an iterative process by the performers and a complexity scientist. We foresee a recursive pipeline, that divides the work into individual, collision and co-production modes. We also foresee a role fluidity - performer, experimenter and documenter are not attached to individuals allowing for a change of perspective. 4. Level of innovation Acknowledging the importance of spaces in the audio-corporeal arts we consider the development of transdisciplinary space practices and notations as our major innovation. Secondly we believe that the particular mode of collaboration between performers and a complexity scientist leads into new artistic methodologies. Thirdly we create a toolbox that refers to the intense qualities of audio-corporeal space articulations and enlargens the disciplinary range of compositional space factors for artistic productivity. 5. Primary staff involved in the project University of Music and Performing Arts (mdw) Institute of Dance Arts / Anton Bruckner Private University Linz Complexity Science HUB Vienna Alphabetically: Rose Breuss (Dance), William Franck (Direct Sound), Johannes Hiemetsberger (Choir), Hanne Pilgrim (Rhythmics).

Spatial experience lies at the heart of many artistic practices, yet existing notations - dance scores, music scores, conductor notations, film storyboards - capture measurements and sequences far better than they capture qualities. This research project developed process-oriented, qualitative forms of notation that embrace the idiosyncrasy of each artistic practice. Our framework is built around three concepts loosely borrowed from differential geometry and statistical physics: charts, null-spaces, and collisions. Each artistic practice contributes a chart - its most distilled spatial expression, like a page in an atlas. When two practices meet, their collision generates a transition between charts, and through accumulating such transitions the atlas grows, revealing an image of shared spatial qualities that, like the surface of the earth, can never be seen all at once. Our practical research focused on four audio-corporeal disciplines - dance, choir conducting, eurhythmics, and direct sound - brought together through dedicated Null-space and Collision Labs. On the methodological side, we published a co-creation methodology formalising this process into seven fluid stages. A closely related published study, 'Dialectic Attempts' (Le Rhythme, 2023), demonstrates how transitions between practices are built through iterative dialectic questioning. Two further tool-oriented outputs operationalise the methodology digitally: SmoothOperator, a device for measuring and characterising smoothness in body movement using motion capture, published at the international Movement and Computing conference (MOCO 2022); and SALTA, a real-time segmentation tool processing video, audio and sensor data from performers, developed to support live research in the studio. Discipline-specific research produced a range of artistic and scholarly outputs. In dance, archival studies of early twentieth-century choreographers - including Grete Wiesenthal, Dore Hoyer and Kurt Jooss - were translated into new scores and performances, published as Spherical Dances (ABPU Press). In direct sound, a choreographic vocabulary for film boom operators was developed and documented in a short film series produced with colleagues from Berlin's leading film academies. 'Six Memos for Pianist and Self-Playing Piano' - a collaboration between a eurhythmician and a composer using Bösendorfer's programmable CEUS - translated Calvino's six literary qualities into spatial compositions, performed at Porgy & Bess Vienna and published in the Handbook Music and Motion (mdw Press). These disciplinary investigations converged in a series of cross-disciplinary performances, culminating in 'Tallis in Wonderland' (Semperdepot Vienna, 2023): a collision of choir, dancers, boom operators, live electronics, and a mathematician, structured around Tallis's Renaissance motet Spem in alium. Further performances - including Choryphony I, II (Volkstheater Wien), Now, as I was about to (Brückenfestival Wienerwald), Palestrina Dances (Volkstheater Wien), Fragments out of Time (Nestroy Theatre Hamakom) and Gong and Circumstance (Humboldt Forum Berlin) - tested the atlas framework in diverse public contexts, demonstrating its potential as a model for genuinely non-hierarchical, transdisciplinary artistic co-creation.