“Machine Movement Lab: Alloyed Bodies [BNE-3-3-1]”


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Title:


    Machine Movement Lab: Alloyed Bodies [BNE-3-3-1]

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Artist Statement:


    Machine Movement Lab: Alloyed Bodies [BNE-3-3-1] is an improvisational performance installation that weaves together creative robotics, dance performance, and more-than-human dramaturgy. The Machine Movement Lab demystifies and, at the same time, reenchants machinelike things by troubling our relationships with robots. It seeks to create a more horizontal playground for human-machine encounters by challenging the dominant politics that shape our socio-technical visions and confine both bodies and things to mimicry and servitude.

    Premiering at ISEA 2024, Alloyed Bodies [BNE-3-3-1] is an extension of our earlier work, Dancing with the Nonhuman, and involves four dance performers, three cube costumes, and one cube robot performer. Alloyed Bodies explores the potential of being more-than-human, how we resonate with the world, how everything is entangled, and how things are different only in relation. The performance tells a story of an encounter with a strange and whimsical cube world. On this emerging playground, dancers and cube artefacts mingle, jumble, and create more-than-human alliances. Bodies and things transform in response, becoming hybrid and tentacular. An evolving soundscape acts as a further nonhuman performer, enveloping and being shaped by these emerging dynamics. The final stage invites audiences to participate, to mingle with the human and nonhuman performers, and to explore this playful tangle from within.

    This project has been partially supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [AR 545] and the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC) [FT190100567 and DP160104706].

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