Dance Magazine: From the dance/tech wonkfest The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) comes a new podcast, Dances with Robots, launching November 14. Hosted by Sydney Skybetter, choreographer and deputy dean of the College for Curriculum and Co-Curriculum at Brown University, with Ariane Michaud serving as co-host and executive producer, the pod features an impressive roster of guests addressing the many points of intersection between dance and technology: choreography, computation, surveillance, embodiment—and, yes, robots.
4 comments:
What has the world come to? As time passes do people become more and more curious? Just pushing the limits of what is possible? Is that the point of living, to just keep moving forward and inventing new ideas or ways of thinking? This article discusses a podcast and the idea of bodies and technology. Which I think is an important thing to discuss. In almost every aspect of life recent technologies or AI features are mentioned. To replace dance with technology or at least parts of it seems pretty extreme to me. Dance is something that is so personal and expressive. Something I thought only a human could invent and execute. Dance is a skill that has to do with rhythm and movement, the idea of moving a body in a way that conveys emotion and feelings. Dance also has so much culture involved with it. It used to be more of a ritualistic thing, which bonded people, now used more for entertainment and skill, and who knows what in the future.
Honestly this article kind of terrifies me. I am generally not that big of a fan of AI especially when it comes to things like art. I was talking with one of the other DPS and we were discussing how sometimes we forget that we go to an engineering school, then leave Pernell and we see all of these robots and it kind of blows our mind. when I was talking to her she said, quote I forget there are people coming for our jobs here. like AI could genuinely take over most of the jobs in the world, especially in the Arts. Now most people say the Arts is where we are most protected, but with things like AI paintings and dancing robots that can learn the flow and humanize themselves with choreography it kind of terrifies me where we are headed. I think AI can be really helpful. We just need to use it in moderation and use it wisely in order to not destroy ourselves with technology.
This was a super interesting article to read. I had previously never heard of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, so I really enjoyed learning about it. I had not thought of how dance and creative performing arts could be integrated into interfaces, it was cool to be introduced to these new perspectives. It was a smart move to make a podcast about the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces because these are very popular right now. They can also reach a wider audience and are generally pretty accessible to those who want to listen. It was cool to read about the wide variety of people who are involved in the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and it is so unique to have an area where “dance practitioners, technologists, critical theorists, scholars, and improvisers” all come together. I am really curious to see what this looks like and understand more about how this new technology is influencing choreography.
Sometimes I forget just how small our industry is! Two summers ago, I studied at Brown under the founder of CRCI and the subject of this article, Professor Sydney Skybetter. While the work I did alongside Skybetter was more focused on accessibility technologies in the arts than choreo-robotics, I’m glad to hear that he is still pursuing this. While I typically frown against AI and robots, I do see a place for dancing robots. Definitely a more frivolous technology, I could see these choreo-robots being utilized in prostheses and orthopedic research. Having robots who can fully understand the organicness to human movement (dance) would allow for more user-friendly medical technologies. This being said, I disagree with Skybetter about the use of these robots in the arts scene. While yes, there is an art to programming these robots to move, I don’t see the appeal of utilizing them over humans. The beauty of group dance pieces is how they adapt and change with each dancer’s movement style, and this would be lost with the introduction of robots.
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