Astrolabe
ASTROLABE – whakaterenga 星盘
Immersive Dance Art Film + VR multimedia installation by Good Company Arts, with Ancient Star Charts/Navigation/Virtual Reality/Dance/Sound/Light/Film/Print Media/Interactive-Exhibition, premiered with the National Museum of Singapore (Dec 2019-Jan 2020). Virtual Reality web journey is here.
Funding
Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa, Otago Community Trust, the National Heritage Board Singapore, and the National Museum of Singapore.
Artists
New Zealand Arts Laureate Daniel Belton leads an internationally acclaimed group of artists to realise this project, featuring Xiao Ke and Zi Han, Janessa Dufty, Jill Goh, Christina Guieb, Jac Grenfell, Patxi Araujo, Stuart Foster, Donnine Harrison, Nigel Jenkins, Michael Askill, Richard Nunns, PerMagnus Lindborg and Joyce Beetuan Koh. Full credits here.
Awards
Finalist Samsung The Wall X NIIO 2020 International Digital Art Competition. Official selection Moving Body Festival Varna 2020 and Semi-Finalist Rio de Janeiro World Film Festival. Honorable Mention Athens International Art Film Festival 2023. Winner Best Production Design New York International Women Festival 2022. Winner Best Short Producer New York International Women Festival 2022. Winner Best Documentary Music Video Rome Music Video Awards 2023. Winner Best Sound Design International Music Video Awards Budapest. Official Finalist Selection at World Stage Design 2022 (Calgary) featuring virtual Mozilla Hubs Exhibition and Webcast Livestream. Official Selection as film, VR and full dome (Planetarium de Bogotá) for Festival Internacional de la Imagen (XXI Image Festival), Colombia.
- “Thoroughly immersive experience for audiences” – Lifestyle Asia
- A masterful exhibition, wonderfully woven together” – National Museum of Singapore
- “Beautiful, intriguing and moving – an excellent and powerful experience” – Composers Society Singapore
- “A spectacular showcase. Astrolabe will allure you to a dream-like, yet futuristic performance” – Timeout Singapore
- “Astrolabe – whakaterenga signals a new chapter in the impressive body of work by Aotearoa’s leading digital dance and movement innovator. Framed by a cross-cultural partnership, the work is anchored in knowledge systems all too easily marginalized or forgotten in the frenetic energy of our era. And yet, it is ancient wisdom that holds the key to our survival as a planetary species” – Theatreview NZ
Artist’s statement
Astrolabe – whakaterenga seeks to reimagine our perception of body, space and time with the support of digital technologies. Astrolabe’s unique visual and aural scenarios created for VR and expanded cinema installation invites the audience to experience different perspectives of space and time – travelling to augmented realms inspired by ancient star charts and maps. This multimedia project enters into a dialogue with methodologies developed by early Asian and Pacific Island astronomers, and suggests a philosophical ideology of the movement of celestial bodies – acknowledging the oneness of all life. The digital arts and dance of Astrolabe transports audiences in an immersive space voyage for virtual reality, film and sound exhibition. (Good Company Arts)
About the sound design
The sound design and electroacoustic music for Astrolabe was made in collaboration by PerMagnus Lindborg, Joyce Beetuan Koh, Jac Grenfell, and director Daniel Belton, with musicians Nigel Jenkins, Richard Nunns, Chan Hing-yan, Cheryl Wong, and others. To generate materials for the Atrolabe composition, PerMagnus Lindborg made recordings of musicians playing, for example erhu 二胡 and biangu 扁鼓 who performed composed fragments in synchronisation with production video clips (‘rushes’). Novel and extended performance techniques were explored in an interactive way between composer and musicians, and recorded. Selected clips were further transformed digitally using custom-made software in Max, including physical modelling and cross-synthesis. The audio materials were mixed together in a DAW, adding audio effects such as pitch-shifting, spatialisation, and reverberation. The composed sections were mixed and edited together with the video clips into several film components. The primary film was projected on a very large screen in the installation space, with stereo sound and subwoofer, and four secondary films were projected on side walls, also with stereo sound. One audio section was projected onto a physical object dis using an overhead hyper-directional loudspeaker. A version of the primary film was adapted for the VR headset experience.
