𝙙𝙞𝙨𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 II performance

disarming II performance continues the disarming series with a performative improvisational setting involving a dancer, a flute player, and a detached robotic arm.

Throughout the 25-minute-long performance, the detached industrial robotic arm ReBel continuously tries to learn how to move forward from the status quo in the human-robot-environment relationship based on stereophonic listening and torque feedback.

Dasha Bogdan, a dancer experienced in Butoh & contact dance, is asked to put herself in the situation of the robot and bodily imagine how she would re-learn body and movements new, based only on acoustic & haptic attentiveness.

Mar Sala Romagosa, a sound artist & flute player with a particular interest in multidisciplinary performances, acoustically contributes her experience in attuning with instruments, improvisation based on listening, and musical references on bodies navigating in space and vice versa.

Collaboratively, they shape a hierarchically balanced performance where all three largely rely on sound and movement as primary modalities while still bringing in their unique body knowledge. Together, they create a performative improvisational moment, potentially allowing the emergence of relationships in flux – of fluid cognition bodies dynamically spanning and fading across the termed entities.

When living in a world with increasingly complex layers of technology in, around, and with us, we certainly lack a logical understanding of those but perhaps, even more, attentiveness to its performativity, a sensibility to the emergent relations between termed entities, an imagination of how algorithms might conceptualize the world different to us.

Core team

Emanuel Gollob – research, concept & production

Daria Bogdan – dancer, performer

Mar Sala Romagosa – flutist, performer

Advice and support

The wonderful WRO ART Center team – curatorial and organizational support

Amir Bastan – real-time robot control

Magdalena May – scenography

Creative Robotics – robotic hardware support

Mira Boczniowicz (WRO Art Center) – video documentation

Software | Reinforcement Learning | vvvv gamma

Acknowledgments | This work was realised within the framework of a European Media Art Platform residency program at WRO Art Center with support from the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.

References excerpt

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press Books; Second Printing edition (July 1, 2007)

Penny, Simon. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. The MIT Press (2019)

Riskin, Jessica. Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life. University of Chicago Press (2007)

Slager, Henk. The Pleasure of Research. Hatje Cantz Verlag (2015)