Practice & Research

Global Pop-Up Film Screenings in interesting locations

AUGORG aims to create a rich diversity of DIY pop-up screenings in interesting and unique locations. Have an idea? Email us or get in touch through our social connect channels. Here is a New York rooftop screening just to get you in the mood.

INTERDISCIPLINARY Practice & Workshops

AUGORG's dance film research works with the practice of moving from the conscious mind (more removed from nature) and returning to our primal awareness (deep subconscious mind-body integration experiences in tune with nature, the weather, landscapes and the seasons). Opening up to the subconscious mind allows us to work directly with links between ‘the nature of the land’, mingling with ‘the nature of the human being' and learning through listening with all of the senses.

We approach dance film practice and research viewing identities as environments. When filmmaker and dancer ‘mirror’ each other, taking turns to lead, both develop a deeper empathy and understanding of the quality of movement expressed by the other. Over time the concept of ‘me’ and ‘you’ dissolves and what begins to open up is an environmental relationship in which differing expressions of presence can be explored freely. These deep spaces that fuse doing and listening, becomes an environment that transforms awareness by increasing neuro-plasticity.

AUGORG’s theory and practice process the increase in mirror neuron characteristics triggered by expressions of the filmmaker in tune and in synch with the dancer. A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in human and primate species, and birds. Workshops explore this through a lens of dance filmmaking both in process and outcome as a methodology for creating deeper listening abilities and empathy through kinesthetic awareness.

We continue to deepen and develop both the relationship between the ‘observer and the observed’. This awareness produces and conceptually challenge notions of ‘location’ linking it to ‘resonating with’. This approach cultivates emergent and authentic expressions of breath that ebb and flow as kinetic dance film landscapes. Subsequent emerging narrative voices arise through continually observing and listening to consonant and dissonant shapes and patterns of movement. 

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Areas & Partnerships

Interdisciplinary dance film processes and workshop modules also integrate the following areas of research: 

Sonochromatism

Sonochromatism or sonochromatopsia: a neurological phenomenon in which colors are perceived as sounds. The phenomenon is created by the union between a brain and a color-to-sound software or chip. The AugOrg project research delves into emotional relationships and combined harmonic narrative possibilities of sonochromatic data.

The AUGORG Finland Project sought to use the sonochromatic tuning system to gain deeper insights into relationships between environmentally triggered emotions and pitch/color data. 

Creative Technology as a Process mapping of Myth 

The fusionist mindset of transmedia story architecture bridges physical and digital environments. These evolving narrative landscapes inform new processes, agile production sprints, and flexible outcomes for both the digital and physical world, as well as the augmentation of both. 

AUGORG utilizes 360 video techniques, interrogates transhuman & post human concepts as well as mythological psychology including animal, human and plant archetypes, rites of passage, ceremony, ritual and healing. 

Communication and Experience Design

 AUGORG explores forms of active listening to natural and constructed environments as a distinct aspect of communication through the lens of audiovisual tech and data tools to guide us back to the wisdom of Mother Earth. AugOrg offers a creative critique of digital communication and networking in its ability to profoundly affect the nature of non-digital communication, relationships and environments.

AUGORG's research delves into the ceremonial applications of Adaptive Choreography (AC). AC is a practice that holds basic alchemical properties of movement that can be changed in ways that best suit the place, space and situation of the moment. Through movement, we choose to articulate and assimilate experiences by embodying things that can not be articulated in words, or often go unnoticed, such as the vibration of grass blades. Breath is also our natural counter, as it is the unconscious interaction we have every moment with our environment. 

AUGORG's choreography has foundational building blocks --blocks of language movement that assist in developing mood, setting and energy levels— using references to elemental bodies of movement such as fire, water, wood/earth, and wind/sky. These blocks are moveable and can be combined into choreographic sequences such as fire-wood, and water-fire as an example. Qi Gong practices and Butoh body weather techniques are also layered in workshop and choreographic development.

In energy contrast, to contribute to a digital representation of body and environment, there are also disruptive choreographic blocks that are inspired by what digital culture has taught us with regard to multiplicity of body and residual body concepts. These digital movement qualities are integrated into our process interactions, at times working with/or against the analogue ways of movement.