Syntony

“Syntony” commissioned for the Pavilion of Montenegro for La Biennale di Venezia (2020) invites visitors to interact with kinetic walls responding to their position and movement through space. The Pavilion presents a series of spatial experiments in perception using mechanical motion, visual projection, and spatialised sound. The Syntony project was led by Vasilija Abramovic, Ruairi Glynn and Parker Heyl

Syntony – from the Greek “Syn” meaning Together and “Tonos” meaning voice – has brought together architects, engineers and scientists to promote “radical transdisciplinarity” as an answer to the Biennale’s big question of “How will we live together?”.

Visitors encounter kinetic walls that respond to their movements, and an illusory installation that manipulates auditory and visual cues to stimulate perceptual ambiguity. Each gallery space within the pavilion acts as a spatial experiment, sparking the public’s curiosity in human perception while gathering scientifically useful data. Together with being a social concept, “Syntony” is also a term describing the phenomenon of resonance where multiple waveform frequencies come together in harmony. Using this notion of overlapping waveforms became a unifying motif for the design team, and is found throughout the Pavilion manifested in kinetic motion, visual projection, and spatialised sound.