Dancing the Algorithm
Digital Catalogue
Dancing the Algorithm invites you to move, play, and explore the emerging ways technology shapes our experience of embodiment. We don’t just use technology—we wear it, speak to it, and even dance with it. It anticipates our desires, becoming an interlocutor in our becoming.
Through immersive, interactive installations, this exhibition is a meditation on movement in the algorithmic age, observing the dissolving boundaries between physical and virtual, human and machine, performer and spectator. Here, the dancing body doesn’t just adapt to technology—it shapes it, challenges it, and celebrates the new choreographic possibilities it can create.
“If technology is already deeply embedded in our daily lives, what does that mean for how we experience embodiment? While we often think of technology as something separate from us—looming and ominous—it is, in fact, intimate. We wear it, we speak to it, it anticipates our desires. If technology is already shaping our perception of the world, perhaps it has the power to be not just a tool of control, but also a site of resistance, of play, of reimagining what it even means to be human.”
— Katherine Helen Fisher
Curated by Katherine Helen Fisher
Score for interactive exhibit space composed by Josh Kadish / Vviota
Artist | Multi-Instrumentalist | Composer
Sincere thanks and gratitude to the entire staff of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, including the following people without whose invaluable work this project would not have been realized: Pamela Tatge, Kim Chan, Jason Wells, Alexa Zanikos, Hunter Styles, Jared Fine, Nick Kepley, Patsy Gay, Sumi Matsumoto, Norton Owen, Nick Kowerko, Lila Kanner, Laura DiRado, David Imani, Nel Shelby, Kat Sirico, Ethan Eldred, Derek Keifer, KB (Klara Ballay), Phoebe West, Alice Jenkins, Ryan Walters, Sean Buenaventura, Casper Apodaca, Kaileykielle Hoga, and Erica Feagin.
EXPLORE THE ARTISTS AND INSTALLATIONS
Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter
Superradiance
2024
Materials: Multichannel video and sound installation
Technique: Custom software, artificial intelligence, machine learning, latent diffusion models, fluid simulation
Superradiance, a multiscreen video and sound installation, film, and performance, explores embodiment, technology, and planetary consciousness, inviting you to extend bodily perception beyond the skin, into the living environment. Poetry, dance, and insights from neuroscience are woven with code and generative AI, evoking a visceral connection to the planet. We are interdependent physically, chemically, and biologically, across time and space; how can we feel this connection in our own bodies? We dance to express ourselves, to connect, and through ritual/ecstatic dance, we experience union with the universe. Through “embodied simulation,” as you observe another person moving, you feel their movement in your own body. In Superradiance, invisible dancers transform forests, oceans, and deserts into extensions of our bodies. Technological mediation explores embodied consciousness rather than escapes it.
Memo Akten & Katie Peyton Hofstadter are California-based interdisciplinary artists and collaborators investigating technology, consciousness, and culture. They create simulations and installations probing the human condition amid AI and transformation. Akten (Istanbul, Turkey), an artist/researcher, explores machine learning, consciousness, and spirituality. He holds a PhD in artistic explorations of Deep Neural Networks from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Assistant Professor, UC San Diego. Hofstadter, a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator, investigates embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. She is co-founder of projects such as the ARORA network and the Climate Clock in NYC. Their projects have been seen worldwide.
Music for Chapter 1: Memo Akten
Music for Chapter 2: Rutger Zuydervelt
Studio Assistant: Milana Gorobchenko
With research support from: Grant Deane + Dale Stokes of the Scripps Ocean-Atmosphere Research Simulator (SOARS); Charlotte Seid, Museum Scientist, Scripps Institute of Oceanography; Jules Jaffe, Research Oceanographer, Scripps Institute of Oceanography
Read the full credits and acknowledgements
Hamill Industries and Kianí del Valle
AI Transmutations: A Posthuman Dance Ensemble
2021
Materials: Video and sound installation based on live performance
Technique: Custom software, machine learning, Gan models, custom model training, AI motion capture
AI Transmutations explores the use of artificial intelligence to enable new forms of visual expression in live performance. It centers on the synthesis between natural organisms and the human body, visualized through dance and movement. AI allows the creation of a virtual ensemble that interacts and moves with del Valle’s choreography, based on the interconnection among different forms of existence on Earth. Using AI, these relations are visualized through a dance ensemble of yet inexistent interspecific organisms responding to the choreography. A specific AI tool developed in 2021 by UPC and Hamill Industries, based on machine learning and computer vision techniques, transfers the dancer’s movements to the visual ensemble, enabling new forms of collaboration between dance, visuals, and music. This piece is based on fragments developed for the live performance commissioned by the SÓNAR Festival within the AI and Music S + T + ARTS program (Barcelona, 2021).
Multidisciplinary choreographer Kianí Del Valle—whose work is rooted in anthropological, biological, and sociological inquiry—has developed a transdisciplinary practice that merges dance and performance art with film, architecture, technology, and ritual, drawing from Caribbean historical narratives and Taíno culture. Using art, science, and technology, Barcelona-based Hamill Industries—Pablo Barquin and Anna Diaz—craft sensory-driven works blurring lines between digital and physical realities. Through experiential storytelling and tool-making, their work reimagines the virtual as tangible. Together, in AI Transmutations, they fuse explorations of embodiment and expanded visuals to create a hybrid performance language that integrates choreography, machine learning, and speculative organisms.
Credits: Concept and direction: HAMILL INDUSTRIES (Anna Díaz, Pablo Barquín). Trained with movement and Al models based on Kianí Del Valle’s choreography. Co-created with Kianí Del Valle and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. UPC team: Stefano Rosso, Martí De Castro and Javier Ruiz. Original sound score: FLOATING POINTS. Graphic design: Cristina López Morcuende. Introductory poem “Al Conjurer”: Belén Palos. Voiceover: Jess Plummer.
Special thanks to: Ferran Marquès, Carles Sora, CITM, ESTAE, Alba Barneda, Gema Arquero at PUFF Barcelona, Manel Diaz, Jorge Penha, Charlotte, Anna Lanau, and especially to Christian, Enric, Antònia and all the team at Sónar.
Visit the artists’ websites: Hamill Industries | Kianí del Valle
David Wallace Haskins
Time Mirror IV
2016–18
Materials: HD camera, HD display, software, and computer
Time Mirror IV is part of a larger body of works that help us slow down and re-enter a relationship with ourselves in real, embodied ways. We face ecological crises around the world, at every level, which affect us all and of which we are all a part. The works address our lack of curiosity and vulnerability, inhibiting us from meeting others with compassion and understanding: the root of our ecological disequilibrium. Days, weeks, even years pass without us fully inhabiting our bodies. Technology and the busyness of life pull us into the mind’s loops until we forget our bodies—or that we live in a vast, relational field extending far beyond our minds and bodies. This disconnection and isolation compounds. Instead of technology as a means of escape, my desire is to use it as a means for connection. Time Mirrors help us see ourselves more clearly: uncurated and alive, leading us beyond the limits of technology and deeper into the interrelational nature of reality in more dynamic ways.
David Wallace Haskins is an interdisciplinary artist using the elements of light, space, time, and sound to create experiential installations and architectural interventions. His works invite participation, challenging assumptions while highlighting interrelational dynamics. Haskins often partners with specialists in psychology, ecology, physics, and philosophy. DWH Studio is based in Chicago, IL.
Visit the artist’s website: David Wallace Haskins
Entroplay (Armon Naeini)
ID Part 1
2025
Materials: TouchDesigner, Kinect Azure, GLSL, Python
ID is a recursive augmentation of the self. A dance with the deconstruction of the self. Strip and segment the body through time and space.
Armon Naeini, an Iranian multimedia artist, creative technologist, and educator, makes work that navigates the paradox of embodiment and dissociation through the augmentation of self-image. His interactive installations, AR/XR experiences, visuals, and experimental hardware explore identity, technology and entropy. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts ITP, he teaches at School of Visual Arts. Exhibitions: Center for Performance Research, Barnard Movement Lab, Times Square billboards, Meow Wolf and more. His interactive media and performances use real-time software.
Visit the artist’s website: Entroplay
Shimmy Boyle, Mingyong Cheng, and Katherine Helen Fisher (Safety Third Productions / Hyperreal Labs)
Bodies in Hyperreality
2025
Materials: Interactive installation responsive to live web inputs
Technique: StreamDiffusion image generator with real-time interaction system built with TouchDesigner, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, WebSockets, archival text prompts, audience text prompts
Bodies in Hyperreality is a real-time, audience-driven choreographic interface that reimagines the body through dance history and algorithmic aesthetics. Two adjacent “mirrors” reflect each participant: one shows a live video feed; the other, a hyperreal AI-generated scene scored by historical dance prompts from Jacob’s Pillow archivists Patsy Gay and Norton Owen. Visitors contribute prompts via a mobile web interface, shaping the machine’s vision. The installation highlights both creative agency and the biases of generative systems, inviting reflection on authorship, embodiment, and algorithmic perception.
Hyperreal Labs creates participatory installations blending performance, emerging technology, and critical theory to explore embodiment, identity, and perception. An early iteration of this project emerged from research developed through the Data Fluencies Theater Project.
Visit the artists’ websites: Safety Third Productions | Mingyong Chen | Katherine Helen Fisher
Xin Ying, Alan Winslow, Kate Ladenheim, and Katherine Helen Fisher
Lamentation: Dancing the Archive
2025
Materials: Volumetric video & gestural interface programmed using TouchDesigner, MediaPipe, and Unity
Lamentation: Dancing the Archive allows audiences to manipulate a volumetric (3D) video of Martha Graham’s iconic 1930 work, Lamentation, with their own gestures and movement. Lamentation is an early modernist distillation of grief through the body. Graham’s display of raw angst, radical for its time, is timely today amidst various catastrophes that parallel those that Graham responded to. The user engages with this work through embodied channels, fostering closeness to this work and building bridges from past to present.
Lamentation: Dancing the Archive is conceived by Xin Ying with the Martha Graham Dance Company and co-created by Xin Ying, Katherine Helen Fisher, Alan Winslow, and Kate Ladenheim. The artists use choreographic knowledge and interaction design frameworks to build embodied connections to emerging technology.
Visit the artists’ websites: Xin Ying | Alan Winslow | Kate Ladenheim | Katherine Helen Fisher
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti (Operator)
Human Unreadable
2023
Materials: p5.js, glsl, Solidity, TouchDesigner, Python, Jupyter, Ethereum blockchain, X-sens Motion Capture, PC, Wireless sensors
Human Unreadable (2023) is a three-act embodied generative artwork by American artist duo Operator. Merging choreography, code, and blockchain, the work hides the human body in plain sight, culminating in a live performance. The collection contains 400 unique visual works and choreographic sequences generated by an algorithm reading a library of motion data. While the work appears organic, it is entirely created through code stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Human Unreadable draws on the histories of computational choreography, Cunningham’s Chance Dance, and the E.A.T. movement. The three acts represent a slow recovery of the human: Act I was the reveal on Art Blocks; Act II uncovered choreographic scores via a secondary token-bound NFT; Act III is a live performance incorporating sequences from the first 100 minted pieces (upcoming December 2026, institution to be announced). Operator’s Generative Choreography Method serves as the technical backbone of Human Unreadable.
Operator (est. 2016) is the Lumen Prize-winning practice of artist duo Ania Catherine (b. 1990, U.S.) and Dejha Ti (b. 1985, U.S.). With Ti’s background as a multimedia artist and human-computer interaction (HCI) technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer and performance artist, they engineer medium-agnostic output, joining environments, technology, and the body.
Lauren Bedal
30 Points of Departure
2025
Materials: Generative AI, model finetuning, digital filtering techniques, After Effects
Music by Michael Wall
30 Points of Departure challenges the notion of sampling and remix culture by presenting a media artifact that is not sampled, but emergent through statistical inference. Using Generative AI models to produce short video clips, each clip is then recursively remixed through a system of prompts that spawns over 30 iterations of new media. Drawing on Lucretius’ materialist conception of creation as “bringing forth,” the work reframes creation and authorship as distributed, speculative, and untethered from direct reference. In doing so, the work gestures beyond traditional remix culture, marking a shift toward a new paradigm of creativity and collaboration with machines.
Lauren Bedal is a choreographer, media artist, and human-computer interaction designer. She has merged choreographic expertise with interaction design to help companies like Google shape how we gesture, sense, and interact with computers. She is a 2024 Knight Foundation co-awardee and Artist in Residence at Angels Gate Cultural Center in Los Angeles.
Visit the artist’s website: Lauren Bedal
Nora Gibson
ARTIFICIAL DANCES
2025
Materials: Kling AI 1.6, OpenArt AI, Flux Dev, the artist’s biodata, custom Python scripting
ARTIFICIAL DANCES is a series of choreographic films created in collaboration with AI filmmaking tools, exploring the expanding boundaries of movement in virtual space. Through an interplay of posing, prompting, and negotiating virtual physics, the work challenges traditional notions of choreography and embodiment. The music for the films was generated from Gibson’s own biodata, captured through sensors and translated into sound via custom Python scripting, further blurring the line between body, code, and composition. In an age where deepfakes provoke anxiety about authenticity, this piece offers a counterpoint: a vision of how technology can transcend physical constraints and reimagine movement as liberated from anatomy, gravity, and self. The collaboration between human and machine intelligence results in a generative, poetic rethinking of dance in the digital age.
Nora Gibson is a choreographer and media artist whose work explores consciousness, embodiment, and artificial intelligence. Merging philosophical and scientific research with poetic expression, her work has been presented internationally at events such as Ars Electronica, MUTEK, the Istanbul Digital Art Festival, and was supported through an internship with the BIAPT neuroscience lab at McGill University. Gibson teaches at the intersection of dance, new media, and emerging technologies.
Visit the artist’s website: Nora Gibson
Daniel Sierra, Cameron Surh, Zelia ZZ TAN, and David Wexler
Pathways
2025
Materials: Unity, Vicon, Captuary
Pathways is an ongoing exploration into building parametric systems that allow us to explore and visualize movement and dance motion capture data in novel ways, with a focus on temporal and spatial manipulation of the movement data. This piece is an audio-visual application of these tools, where the various parameters are animated over time to music.
Daniel Sierra is a digital artist whose work focuses on movement, music, and algorithmic art. He’s been working in the broader field of interactive computer graphics since 2013, with experience spanning many areas from building spatial operating systems for mixed reality devices, live virtual reality music concerts, to interactive installations.
Visit the artist’s website: Daniel Sierra
KAMBARA+
The Spirit of Kangie
2025
Materials: Unity, Unreal, 8i, Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture, Adobe Premiere
Producer: KAMBARA+
Conceived by: Yayoi Kambara
Dance artists: Nobuko Miyamoto, Chie Saito, and Lani Yamanaka
Choreography: Nobuko Miyamoto, Yayoi Kambara, and Lani Yamanaka
Music: Kangie and 120,000 stories
Text: Nobuko Miyamoto
Spirit of Obon was commissioned by Georgia Tech Ferst Center for the Arts in 2022 as a holographic Obon dance tutorial with a real-time human-interactive computing for 二度と(NI DO TO): an XR pilgrimage, an extended reality exhibit based on the choreographic research of Kambara’s IKKAI means once: a transplanted pilgrimage. Spirit of Kangie is built with mixed reality assets from Spirit of Obon to uplift Nobuko Miyamoto’s work as an artist and activist. Through Kangie (meaning “gathering of joy”), we come together in Nobuko Miyamoto’s choreographic movement, which was intentionally crafted as a re-gathering after the COVID-19 pandemic. In Bon-Odori, a Japanese and Japanese-American Buddhist tradition, we dance together in a circle to honor our ancestors and celebrate life by moving as a community.
Volumetric capture at Metastage Studio in Los Angeles, California
Rendered in Unreal by John Crawford
Rendered in Unity by EJ Johnston
Video editing by Tiffany Schmidt
Kangie was commissioned by the Buddhist Churches of America Music Committee.
Choreography: Nobuko Miyamoto. Music: Nobuko Miyamoto (composer, lyricist, vocals). Derek Nakamoto: Composer, arranger. Isaku Kageyama: Taiko. Mike Penny: Shamisen. Mark Izu: Sho. Kaoru Watanabe: Shinobue, ryuteki. Kenny Endo: Tsuzumi, percussion. Nancy Sekizawa: Vocals. Helen Ota: Vocals. Reverend Masao Kodani: Vocals. Reverend Ryuta Furumoto: Vocals. Recorded at The Nest, Los Angeles; Chris Sorem: Sound Engineer.
120,000 stories was produced by Derek Nakamoto & Quetzal Flores, additional mastering by Denny Fongheiser for Sonic Bliss Productions, annotated by Nobuko Miyamoto, Gerald Albright appears courtesy of Bright Music Records, Smithsonian Folkways executive producers: Huib Schippers and John Smith, and production managers: Sojin Kim, Logan Clark, and Mary Monseur
Special thanks to Metastage, The Georgia Institute of Technology, Japanese Arts Network, the George and Sakaye Aratani CARE fund administered by UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, and Japanese American Citizens League San Jose.
Founded in 2015 by Yayoi Kambara, KAMBARA+ is a non-profit arts organization that produces multidisciplinary dance performances, dedicated to amplifying embodied narratives and experiences through a multidisciplinary approach, seamlessly integrating live performance, film, and interactive digital media.
Yayoi Kambara was a company member with ODC/Dance from 2003 to 2015. Kambara started her career as a professional dancer and currently directs and produces multi-media performance works, including film and XR. In 2023, Kambara was recognized as a female stage director by Opera America. She is a co-interrogator of Dancing Around Race and a certified yoga teacher. This fall, Kambara will be a first-year student in the PhD program for Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Visit the artist’s website: Yayoi Kambara
Entroplay (Armon Naeini)
ID Part 2
Danced by Anaya Gonzalez @anayacierra of BODYTRAFFIC
Tina Finkelman Berkett, Founding Artistic Director
Creative Direction Katherine Helen Fisher
Production Cameron Surh
Filmed at Jacob’s Pillow
ID is a recursive augmentation of the self. A dance with the deconstruction of the self. Strip and segment the body through time and space.
Armon Naeini, an Iranian multimedia artist, creative technologist, and educator, makes work that navigates the paradox of embodiment and dissociation through the augmentation of self-image. His interactive installations, AR/XR experiences, visuals, and experimental hardware explore identity, technology and entropy. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts ITP, he teaches at School of Visual Arts. Exhibitions: Center for Performance Research, Barnard Movement Lab, Times Square billboards, Meow Wolf and more. His interactive media and performances use real-time software.
Visit the artist’s website: Entroplay