What we do:
Our mission is to integrate art, science, and the humanities in the development of creative works that tell stories and unpack the dense cultural content around us. We believe such projects serve a greater educational purpose and enrich community through performative art. Harmonic Laboratory is committed to providing resources and support to projects and participants that endeavor to cross boundaries of discipline, ideology, and form in the creation of innovative and compelling artwork.

Meet the Members

Harmonic Laboratory consists of Choreographer/Dancer Brad Garner, Composer/Musician Jeremy Schropp, Animator/Programmer John Park, and Intermedia-Artist/Programmer/Composer Jon Bellona.

A collaborative in flux, by challenging each other and their audiences, this quartet presses into the margins of their fields and intends to create new works only possible through collaboration.

The Work

Meet Brad Garner | Choregrapher/Dancer

Contemporary Dance is an evolution of Western concert dance that plays between extremes of movement form and subject. There is no formal adherence to narrative, in the Contemporary vernacular movement itself is a valid and interesting subject. What is exciting to me about contemporary dance is play between these two extremes, the ability to look completely outside the box for new ways to shape human movement into art.

My choreography changes according to the subject matter of a given piece. Sometimes the work is of a romantic nature, lifted, lyrical, baroque, other times it is a comment on modern technology, mechanical, systematic, and direct. I do not set stylistic rules for myself…I don’t have to. I can blend the wrestling athletic nature of contact improvisation with the lines and arcs of classical ballet. I can pull through space with the rhythmic isolations of jazz, or fall and tumble in and out of the floor like capoeira. My choice of subject reflects these dualities, the openness of the Contemporary form. My work draws connections between seemingly unrelated topics, gaps and missing information, beauty and age, humans and volcanoes. The combination of my work, my investigation into these topics, with that of others, the process of one informing the other, is fascinating and exciting.

-Brad Garner, 2010

Meet: John Park | Animator/Programmer/Digital-Artist

When I work in time-based art I like to think about the transitions between space and time. While fixed animation allows me to hold and maintain control over the piece by crafting a complete experience, interactivity forces me to create a tone, or environment that allows the user to craft a unique experience of their own. Interactivity forces us to question our boundaries in terms of our own work. How much do you let go? Do you make the decision here, or do you let the audience have control? Do you trust your audience to make good decisions? If so, how can you enable them in an experience? If not, how do you keep them out of trouble?

Collaboration surely intersects with this idea. In an environment of academia where interdisciplinary work is lauded yet rarely seen, a University can be an isolating location of specificity. There is room to promote collaboration in the classroom, but it is a trickier to find in interpersonal practice. I’d like to see time spent talking and sharing the small truths we find in everyday life.

My small truths revolve around issues of the power of technology, lifestyle, and the ignition of creativity. This is the time in history to promote creative solutions to the problem of the excess material around us. How can we use and reuse things, take them apart, recombine, completely abandon their original uses in favor of new or improved ones? What role does the creation of virtual things play in this? Three lines of code can perform a thousand mundane tasks in a few seconds. And while there is value in the programming and processing of the mundane, I am intrigued by the possibility of the programming and processing of a thousand exquisite tasks. A performance unbound by resources, art beyond consumption. Can this go from a hobby, to a mental exercise, to a full blown lifestyle? Increasingly the answer appears to be YES.

-John Park, 2010

  John Park’s Admirations

 

Robert Hodgin (AKA, Flight 404)
Samples:  Website, Animations on Vimeo

 

 

 

Arthur Ganson (MIT)
Samples:  Website

Meet: Jon Bellona | Intermedia-Artist/Programmer/Composer

My choice for expression is three-fold, and all my outlets revolve around music in some way: music composition and performance using alternate, data-based controllers; intermedia projects building bridges between technology, music, and other art disciplines; musical writing within two pop outfits (alt-folk Confidant, and noise-pop Pope Blackout). While my communicative choices may oscillate work-by-work (due mainly to the changing nature of technology), I consistently return to these same three modes of intermedia expression.

I choose music because sound is a brilliantly fluid form. From fleeting, natural and man-made sounds that comprise our daily world, to fixed-timbre recordings of our favorite artists available at arm’s reach, to designing and molding completely new timbres, sound resides inside any container that we can conceivably construct. You and I have the ability to touch and shape the sounds around us, casting extremely rigid rules upon sound or enabling the indeterminate manifestations of all sound at any given moment and for any given length of time. Technology has enabled us to sculpt sound completely, and we may create outside of the normative boundaries of instruments and instrumental devices.

Today, there are almost infinite possibilities to formulating music, including prodigious ways to integrate music, visual art, dance, and other art forms together. Today’s Gesamtkunstwerk is a technological collective, a laboratory ripe with beautiful forms and products. Regardless of the degree of directions one could travel along, the song remains the same in our pursuit of artistic expression: the idea of communication and encouraging communication.

-Jon Bellona, 2010
Main Music Projects: http://jpbellona.com/music
Side Project, Pope Blackout: http://jpbellona.com/music#popeblackout

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