Celebrate the opening of the ArtLab with an afternoon of art and dance featuring OJ Slaughter, Andy Graydon, and Ilya Vidrin’s Partnering Lab. Experience an open studio with the Partnering Lab, dance-science research lead by Ilya Vidrin. Have your portrait taken by Boston-based photographer OJ Slaughter, and explore an art installation by Andy Graydon installed in ArtLab’s sound studio.
The art & science of partnering with Ilya Vidrin and the Partnering Lab. The ArtLab will be transformed into an interactive research laboratory where movement is the primary research tool. Harvard University Fellow Ilya Vidrin’s Reciprocity Collaborative brings together the expertise of Argentinian Tango, Latin/Ballroom Technique, Classical Pas de Deux, and Contact Improvisation to further develop mobile interface technology that investigates the aesthetic ideals and ethical dimensions of partnering.
Their work manifests in research in clinical care, community engagement, site-specific performance, interactive art, and more. The collaborative’s current research investigates wearable technology for movement interventions for diverse populations in artistic, clinical, and professional settings, including professional performers, patients with movement disorders, and individuals seeking to develop strategies to communicate effectively, efficiently, and ethically.
OJ Slaughter is a Boston-based photographer who had a research studio with the ArtLab in the summer of 2019. During this studio, they developed a new project, The Modern Black History Project. For this event, OJ returns to the ArtLab to create a participatory portrait studio.
Andy Graydon, Harvard Fellow at the Film Study Center 2019-2020, often creates sound-based installations, films, and sculptures to address community, history, and language themes. A* is Graydon’s newly commissioned video installation and sound composition muses on the Event Horizon Telescope, an international network of telescopes working together to capture the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. A process called Very Long Baseline Interferometry coordinates the simultaneous observations, allowing it to form one coherent picture. This process of resolving an image from patterns of interference, drawing from multiple perspectives that are distant and complex, is a central metaphor in the work. A* was commissioned by the 2019 Honolulu Biennial and was workshopped at the ArtLab in the Spring of 2019. Graydon lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.