Hybrid Performance: »Dancing at the Edge of the World«

Contact Data

Address: Einsteinufer 43-53

5. Stock VH

10587 Berlin

Germany

Description

Thursday, March 18, 2021, 6 p.m.
Livestream performance followed by Q&A with participating artists*, designers and scientists*. In English, the event will be streamed on www.hybrid-plattform.org

Dancing at the Edge of the World is a piece of postdramatic theatre, a physical poem, a ballad of humans and machines. This performance was developed by REPLICA and their collaborators during a period of artistic research hosted by the Berlin Open Lab of the University of the Arts Berlin in autumn 2020. It represents a poetic exploration, which shifts the locus of knowledge production for AI-design by rooting it in the experience of the body. This is a work-in-progress, showcasing a semantic sonification of movement as a synthetic voice attached to the body by means of a wearable device.

The choreography of the piece becomes generative of acoustic traces in space, which are remotely reminiscent of a spoken language. It is a living cartography: fueled by the moving bodies of the performers, exposing their capabilities and limitations. The technology becomes a medium for interconnecting, as well as for interrogating the embodied agencies engaged in a polyphony of exchanges and interactions.

The performance unfolds in a series of episodic movement sketches, each scene an experiment — an exploration of interwoven movement, embodied memory and technique. The knowledge of the body as a living archive reveals itself through its performativity and is underlined by the voice from the machine. The non-linear narrative hints at the vulnerability of the individual, as well as its reliance on the other.

Information about the team:

Performance | REPLICA & Friends

Creative technology
Mika Satomi | costume and interaction design, ML
Meredith Thomas | data visualisation, ML

Sound design
Johannes Helberger (kling klang klong)
Lugh O'Neill

REPLICA is an interdisciplinary performance collective and laboratory for embodied experimentation with digital tools, new media and speculative design. They envision the dance-theatre of tomorrow — playful, subversive, interactive, underpinned by new emergent cultures and social change — and explore how technologies permeate the collective unconscious to generate new aesthetic codes. Fostering interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, designers, creative coders and new media artists, they imagine and rehearse future societies with their folklores, and prototype new tools and rituals.

The Hybrid Plattform, an initiative of the Universität der Künste Berlin and the Technische Universität Berlin, facilitates interdisciplinary exchange between the realms of art, science and technology. Here artists, scientists and experts collaborate beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines and institutions on issues and questions of critical future importance. In the process exceptional projects, new networks, further platforms and innovative teaching and research methods are able to emerge.