The Will to Synchronize is a collaborative arrangement in three acts—objects made from vocal recordings, choreographed performance, and installation—that query the nexus, control, and evolution of relationships as they move into the state-regulated bubble of online space. As socialization becomes an increasingly mechanical meditation, The Will to Synchronize works to materialize how we store memory: inside the installation, performers and viewers interact with objects that have been rendered from sound in a recursive process of cleaning, tending, and preservation. As the sound recordings that have been transformed into object(ified) data are continually processed over the course of the exhibition, The Will to Synchronize points to the revolutionary power of different ways in which we interpret and translate in order to connect when daily social interaction migrate online.

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Review by T.S. Flock in Vanguard Magazine

This project started with questions. Are we connected to people? How can we tell if we are connected or not? How and with what tools can we measure our connections? How do we store, process, and collect these connections? Who is in your social network? How are these connections surveilled? What do you not know about these people?

- Questions asked of 65 people -

1.) What object, memory, ritual or dream provides you solace? Either by holding it, looking at it or thinking about it.
2.) What does it look like, smell like and feel like?
3.) What is it made out of?

I took these answers and turned them into 2-D sounds waves that I then translated into 3-D sound waves on a laith that made. During the exhibition, the back room was the "factory" where myself and AB made the voices, cleaned them and then prepared them for the "database."

Here is a close-up image of me carving a sound wave.

While I was carving and AB was polishing and preparing, small video cameras hovered above our hands and projected live on the windows facing outside the gallery. Viewers could see our hands manufacturing the sound waves inside the gallery and outside.

Here is one of the two "databases" in which all of the 3-D sound waves are connected by copper wire to the larger system.

*The sound composition played during the exhibition by Spencer Ramsey is available through this image.*

A view of the 3-D sound waves connected by copper wire.


Thanks to these people


Sound composition - Spencer Ramsey

Video engineering - Molly Mac and Steven Miller

Performances - AB and Donnell Williams

Space and construction engineer - Paul D. McKee

Editing and talking through ideas - Kemi Adeyemi, Jed Murr and Dan Paz


Thanks to everyone who participated and helped make this project.