Type/Dynamics
Type/Dynamics is an interactive installation and short dance film, created with design studio LUSTlab and filmed live inside the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The work places two dancers inside a space governed by the real-time flow of global news; where Ground Zero, the Reichstag, and Tiananmen Square materialize not as images but as living typographic worlds.
“Two dancers collide in a chamber filled with liquid light and, for a moment as chance as their encounter, the chaos of the universe begins to take form. If it sounds like science fiction, you’re not too far off—this is TYPE/DYNAMICS, the new film from Ruben Van Leer”
the body inside the data
The installation, developed with LUSTlab, continuously searches for locations currently in the news and pulls their surroundings from Google Street View. Then abstracts them into grids of dynamic typography, filled with the headlines, fragments, and noise circulating around that place at that exact moment. Nothing is fixed. Nothing repeats. The space is always somewhere else, always now.
Dancers Valentina Scaglia and Lukas Timulak move through this world in a semi-improvised response. Their bodies reading the environment the way a body reads a room, adjusting to what the data makes visible and to what it buries. The choreography is not illustrative. It is a form of live attention: two nervous systems in dialogue with an information landscape that has no edges and no still point.
Van Leer filmed the work on a regular open day at the Stedelijk, capturing the encounter as it happened. Museum visitors passing through, watching, becoming part of it. The result is a short film that holds the friction between the intimate and the global, between embodied presence and the endless stream of the world's events pressing in from the walls.
“The presentation at the Stedelijk reveals the disparities in research modalities in the pre and post digital age: what can be achieved with dynamic typography today in contrast to earlier manual techniques? The exhibition attempts to offer a glimpse of how typography may evolve in the future. ”
credits
| Direction | |
| A Short Film by | Ruben Van Leer |
| Concept Design | LustLAB |
| Choreography | Lukas Timulak |
| Performance | |
| Dancers | Valentina Scaglia & Lukas Timulak |
| Music & Sound | |
| Sound & Music | Boris Acket |
| Production | |
| Filmed at | Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam |
| Supported by | Microsoft, StiFo, AFK, Camalot |
| Produced by | LUSTlab & Truth.io |
| Special Thanks | |
| Many Thanks to | LUSTlab team, film crew and participating audiences |
filmmaker & media-artist
