Synchrony 2013-2021, Lorena Mal. Installation View. 

Lorena Mal, Le livre de musique/la selección natural (the gap between two beats), 2013-2020, found books, artist frame.
Synchrony (one day at all times)
Lorena Mal

Old Stone House + Online

February 6th

12 - 4 pm

Synchrony (one day at all times) is live event featuring a 24 hrs sound work for piano by artist Lorena Mal (Mexico City), based on the pulse rythms of different living organisms, human and non-human.

A section of the piece (12:00 to 16:00hrs) will be playing at the Old Stone House North Garden. This work is a preamble for the upcoming exhibition Common Frequencies* at BioBAT Art Space, as part of her long research project Synchrony (2015-2021) that comprise archival objects, modified metronomes, scores and a performance for 2 pianos and multiple interpreters. 

The presentation at OSH will include materials with information about the piece and the sounds in the space. A QR code with the link to the web livestream will be available on the site for people to continue streaming the piece once they leave the park

 

SYNCHRONY 24HRS - GENERAL TIMES BY STATE:

00:00 to 05:15 --5hrs 15 'hibernation

05:15 to 10:30 --5hrs 15 'sleep

10:30 to 18:45 - 8hrs 15 'calm**

18:45 to 22:45 - 4hrs activity

22:45 to 23:15 - 30 'maximum

23:15 to 23:59 - 60 'sleep

 

Synchrony explores various notions of ‘living’ time through the meeting between systems that measure it’s passing, where rhythm is both biological and musical, and tempo, pace or heartbeats are all counted as beats per minute. Combining archival objects, images, modified metronomes, scores and a series of events for 2 pianos and multiple interpreters playing simultaneously different temporalities, the project takes the standard metro- nome as main subject to inquire, and departs from the coincidence between the human heartbeat and it’s limits - both from 40 beats per minute (Grave, or an adult human sleeping) to 208 bpm (Prestissimo, or an adult human before collapse)- to propose another sense of pace beyond a dominant history of human “law” (metronome, metron “measure” and nomos “regulating, law”), based on the heartbeat data of all living organisms found publicly to date on scientific literature, as polyrhythmic relations to experience different bodies across states of sleep, hibernation, calm and activity. 

Disrupting the limits of the metronome and staging tensions of the human capacity of interpretation and perception, Synchrony formulates their own sense of ‘movement’, ‘chords’, and ‘scales’ within a new range to move around that goes from 1bpm to 1511bpm (from a clam in calm, mesodesma mactroides, to a shrew in stress, suncus murinus), among other 356 species in-between, setting unexpected encounters and silence intervals, turning the act of listening into an intersubjective process of reciprocity, even involuntary.

 

 

*Common Frequencies is a binational project curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen, also featuring works by Marcela Armas, Tania Candiani, Gilberto Esparza and Interespecifics.

** Third Movement: Adagio (calm) in collaboration with Emilio Hinojosa (Composition), Lauren Nichols (Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University), Clink Penick (Ecology, Evolution, & Organismal Biology, Kennesaw State University), and Rob R. Dunn (Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University).

 

The graphic design and technical aspects of the presentation of this piece are possible thanks to the support of Generador Estudio Gráfico (Deborah Gutiérrez-Muro, José Alberto Paz Dominguez, Oscar Ali Barragan Velázquez) and Jorge Vélez Quintero.