ARTIFICIAL DANCES

Artificial Dances (2025) Premiered: Jacob's Pillow, "Hyperreal: Dancing the Algorithm", curated by Katherine Helen Fisher Nora Gibson/Kling1.6/Open Art I am deeply interested in how “thinking,” “imagination,” and synthesis of information happens as between AI and humans, and am an advocate for the rigorous pursuit of consciousness research as we increasingly incorporate the use of AI in our daily lives and as General Intelligence is being pursued. Throughout time, technology has shaped human creativity, and, through Artificial Dances, I am observing how my creativity is affected through the use of artificial intelligence, and how AI becomes a collaborator in my choreographic process. I have been working the past few years with physiological data and feedback loops in the form of real time visuals and sound created via live sensor data. The music featured in Artificial Dances is created from the data of my electrodermal activity. I am interested in data as a by-product of the human body as a micro-material for art-making, just as I use my own body as a macro-material to make dance. I am further interested in the loops that occur between ourselves and the art object, between people’s bodies, and as mediated by technology while experiencing art. I am inspired and indebted to people like Merce Cunningham, who challenged his creativity through the use of Life Forms. I am part of a way of thinking about ideas that is not strictly delineated as either art or technology, or philosophy, or science, believing that our biggest questions require a plural approach. Artificial Dances is an ongoing series of solos for AI dancers. They are a foil for humans to register their own feelings in response. Do these artificial dancers convey a quiet confidence? Is there a feminist strength to their virtuosic abilities and that they seem to dance for no gaze but their own inner eye? Do we instead feel a loneliness for them, and are we mistrustful of their synthetic bodies or unemotive and unhurried way? As I navigate my own feelings about synthetic beings, I try to convey my own ambivalence through these dances.