This is the unseeable space in which machine learning makes its meaning. Beyond that which we are incapable of visualizing is that which we are incapable of even understanding. — James Bridle

Latent space, in the realm of machine learning and artificial intelligence, refers to a high-dimensional abstract space where data’s intrinsic, hidden features are represented in a compressed form. This space is particularly significant in the context of generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and transformers, where it serves as the groundwork for the models to learn, encode, and manipulate the underlying patterns of the data they’re trained on. By navigating through this latent space, these models can generate new instances of data that, while reflective of the learned patterns, are distinct and original.

In “Duets in Latent Space,” embodies a live collaboration between the artist or user— situated before a laptop — and generative AI models that reside within this enigmatic latent space. Through various forms of input, whether they be movements, sounds, or digital interactions, the AI responds in kind, generating visual, auditory, or textual outputs that are played back in real time.

In “Duets in Latent Spaces,” I navigate different trajectories in the domain where machine learning finds its meaning inspired by James Bridle’s contemplation on locating these spaces beyond our capacity to visualize or understand.

“Duets in Latent Spaces” is conceptualized as a lecture-performance, installation and webpages, designed to bridge the realms of the tangible, the remembered and the speculative, facilitating presentations both in person and online.

This project unfolds through a series of vignettes combining stories, re-tellings, interfaces, software, movement scores and re-performances, each spanning 3 to 7 minutes, that illuminate trajectories of the generative potential of human-AI interaction, inviting the audience into a collaborative narrative that melds human intuition, storytelling with algorithmic playfulness.

Each segment is woven with personal stories, dances, histories about cybernetics, migration, post-coloniality and choreographic thinking. They venture into uncharted probability spaces, powered by bespoke applications I’ve developed to interface with advanced generative AI models and machine learning models for body and gesture recognition.

These interactions forge semantic and action landscapes that delve into the deep, unseen dimensions of data, cultural memory and language. By reversing the hegemonic narratives of generative AI and manipulating inputs, actions, and prompts, I navigate the AI models’ generative processes exploring their emancipatory potential, forging unique cognitive recombinations with evolving texts, images, and soundscapes set within the ethereal spaces of desire, affect, memory, longing and hybrid materiality.

Central to this project are several technologies: p5.js, enabling creative coding in the browser; Next.js, for rendering server-side React applications; machine learning models for hangs gesture and body movement recognition; humansLarge Language Models (LLMs), offering extensive capabilities for generating human-like text; and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), known for producing highly realistic images. These technologies underpin the performance, emphasizing REAL-TIME dynamic interactions that highlight the creative and epistemic challenges of generative AI.

Moreover, “Duets in Latent Spaces” extends beyond the performance realm into live, interactive applications, making the underlying technology directly accessible. The apps themselves, alongside their source code, are freely available, inviting further exploration and engagement from the audience and the broader community. This transparency aims to demystify the technology, encouraging a hands-on understanding and critical examination of AI’s role in shaping our perceptions of identity, creativity, and reality.

This project and each node is a mutable invitation to ponder the unseen forces that mold our digital and physical existence (as memory and imagination), offering a nuanced perspective on the intricate relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence. Through this work, I challenge audiences to reflect on the invisible dimensions that influence our world, inhabiting the gap between the known and the unknowable latent space of entropic creativity.

It has been presented at:

-. Generative AI, Arts and Ethics, think-tank at Chateau de Fey, France March 5th of March 2024.

-. ACCAD Future Tech | The Ohio Stare University OSU Dance (Online) February 22nd 2024

-. Unfinished Fridays @ Berlin Lake Studios February 23rd 2024.

It can be adapted to be presented as installation-performances, installations, online apps and as line and online lecture-performance.

Nodes

Hyper-elements in Latent Space

• Model: Stable Diffusion XL
• Perlin Noise
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

Extraordinary Alien

• Model: MediaPipeGesture Recognition
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

Entropic Haiku

• Model: GPT-4
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

In Pursuit of Stolen Ghosts

• Model: Stable Diffusion XL
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

Bauhaus Time Traveller

• Model: Stable Diffusion XL
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

Impossible Simplicity

• Model: MediaPipe Pose Landmark
• GitHub Repository with project description, code and live app

Lots of gratitude for the granted access of the most advanced realtime models from Fal.ai

For booking and/or information contact marlon@dance-tech.net

LAKE Studios Berlin — Dance Research and Residency Center

To round out our 2024 Submerge program, LAKE Studios is seeking finished performance works that explore the intersections of (live) music and dance. We are particularly interested in artists and works that give voice to underrepresented cultural expressions in the German contemporary dance and performance scene.

OUR CALL: We are looking for finished pieces — solos, duets or trios — 30 to 40 minutes in length, to be presented in an evening or afternoon double-bill with another artist’s work. We will also give consideration to durational pieces or installations designed for public spaces.  Artists must be willing to offer a two-day workshop, The Choreographer’s LAB, to introduce their work processes to other professional performance artists. Workshops will take place from 11:00 – 16:00 on two consecutive days. Chosen pieces will be presented either the week of August 5th, August 19th, or the week of August 26th. Artists must be based in Berlin.

THEME: Pleasure and Groove, Rhythm and Resistance

“We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.”  Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

This year’s SUBMERGE Festival will highlight the confluence of music and dance, and their joint potential to foster joy, strength, resistance and resilience. We will consider works connecting (live) music and dance that address any of these questions:

Do you have a finished work that holds at its center the relationship between music, rhythm and dance?

A piece that explores the philosophical potential of rhythm, the musical body, the gratification of dance performed with live music, and/or the risks and rewards of presenting the dance-inherent-in-music and the-music-inherent-in-dance? Does your work fit the guiding quote above?

Does it explore activism via tools of music and dance? 

Is your work engaged with underrepresented dance and music within the German contemporary dance and performance scene?

Does your work celebrate the joyful power of performance and challenge us to think critically or act with awareness in the face of adversity?

The SUBMERGE Festival will take place in barrier free studios.

WHAT WE OFFER:

• Two-day Workshop 500€ for one facilitator
• Performance 350€ per artist
• Light and tech support for performance
• Professional video and photos of performance
• Child care support during workshop and performance
• Accessibility support
• 4 hours of Studio time in July or August

To apply, use the application form, available HERE and on our website for download. Applications can be submitted in German or English. Email complete forms to submergefestival@gmail.com.  

APPLICATION DEADLINE: May 15th

Being a heavy internet user with a relatively uncommon name, the first thing that comes up when I look for my name in quotes is my "Linked-In" page:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bradfordchapin

Next is Facebook. My profile page, and then "The Bradford Chapin Appreciation Society" facebook group-- a group some friends from undergrad made as a (flattering) joke.

Next is the page for the theatre where I most recently worked - California Shakespeare Theatre. I was their sound engineer for 2 years, but the page that shows up is the one and only Sound Design I did for them - Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days." Ask me about the rattlesnake story from that play sometime (Cal Shakes is an outdoor theatre in the beautiful Berkeley Hills).

http://www.calshakes.org/v4/ourplays/happy_days.html

Next there's a reunion.com BS page, then an ancestry BS page, and THEN there's my DANCE-TECH.NET PROFILE! YES!!!

A fun fact I found farther down the google page:

When alphabetizing the major towns in Franklin County Iowa, Bradford and Chapin are right next to each other. COOL. Maybe I'll visit both one day...

Cheers,

Bradford

I have done this search on my name as "Robert Dagit" several times now, and it has come to the same conclusion... I can't hide...

Now,

Is this a good thing due to the fact that most people seem to remember my name fairly easily (where I have a hard time remembering names period) and can find me without much effort as a simple search will come up with my Facebook, linkden, twitter (forgot I had that), myspace (does anyone use that) and some other random cites allong with many of the press releases from the shows that I had the pleasure to work on....

Or a bad thing due to the fact that people can easily see if I am lying about X or Y show that I have worked on (most of the time) and those few people who I no longer want to talk to can stalk me.... easily...

Right now there are "four" people that I can see with my name, and someone named Arron Robert Dagit... I either case, It's not hard to tell the difference as one is an insurance salesman from Iowa, one is a Reverend in Flordia (I wish I were there right now, YEY warm) and myself. I can't seem to find anything on the fourth one exept he "exists". To be honest, I can't find anyone of the other Robert Dagit's on any other social site which I would suggest means that they just don't have a facebook account...

So, what does this mean? Do I have to live with some restrictions? I probably should, but I don't.... I do have my facebook with as high of a privacy restriction as possiable for people I do not know. There's also a privacy shield against old school mates, facebook game buddies, bosses I do not trust, etc... but exept for the facebook game buddies, most of these "groups" are no more than a dozen people. I guess it's my knowledge that me having a few pictures of me with a good burbon isn't going to cost me a job or friend that I needing to be dealing with. Strangely, I never restricted anything when my extended family (finally) started getting facebook account and most of them were actually suprised I haven't gotten in more trouble... But then you'd have to know my family to know how much trouble they got in as young adults....

Though, as far as the public sees... I'm A sound Designer that works for places that are not afraid of announcing the opening of a show 3-4 times a piece... oh well... I guess it's free advertisement for later on. No way I can hide the fact that I'm a Sound Designer and Student of USI (undergrad) and UofI.

The full title of the article:

"The Extended Body: Telematics and Pedagogy" (Kozel 2.5)

I have expressed my objection to the term pedagogy. Here's a link to a discussion of andragogy. "Telematics," the word, leads me to another objection, one that pertains in general to the writing in the article. Words can be stumbling blocks to meaning, and opaque sentences full of abstruse terms do not serve the cause of learning. See "On Bullshit."

Nevertheless, the article serves as a useful springboard for many obvious features of the technologically extended creative workspace. Considering 'mediated presence' in light of the several ambiguities swirling around the concept ('mediated' as 'generated by or aided by media' as well as in the sense of 'modified by an intermediary' and presence as defined by its opposite, absence), the article starts with a suggestion that technological breakdowns mimic human breakdown when it comes to communication.

The article predates Facebook by a almost a decade. The social networks make a point of being absent as well as present. Being 'friends' with someone one barely knows, and doesn't feel particularly comfortable with in 'real time' is a form of mediated absence. One can 'know' this person, and be known, in a way outside normal boundaries of social behavior. (Another example is the person that becomes a demon behind the wheel of an automobile. This person has just greeted you fondly on the way to the garage. A moment later, you are nearly run over by this same person, now a driver, enclosed in a mediating metal box, clearly in an impatient mode, aware only of being in a hurry, leaving you shaking your head to the sound of squealing tires and the pall of blue smoke.)

Communication breaks down. The networks have latency, and we are lost between the spaces on a virtual desktop. I find this embrace of 'space' particularly poignant and potentially useful. The interactive workspace and art form searches for meaning as much as it searches for the next breakthrough. Here is a metaphor that offers a meaningful clue. The spaces between windows are the spaces between us.

Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, The People Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

In The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, Jacqueline Shea Murphy explores the role Native American dance practices and ideologies played in the development of modern dance and choreography. Shea Murphy argues for a complex understanding of dance and representations of dance as legitimate historical documents and tools for gaining entry to and addressing Native American social, cultural, and political histories. Shea Murphy illustrates how Native American dance offers different representations of time, corporeality, (stage) performance, dance representation, causation, and ancestral relations in contrast to European epistemes. In this way, Shea Murphy argues that modern dance partly constituted itself against the Native American dancing body, and over its imagined disappearance and ideologies. Presenting a non-neutral, particular, and political understanding of dance, Shea Murphy links this ongoing process of “cultural exchange” and the varied shifts of dominant group ideology about Native dances to a continued active process of justifying colonialism and indigenous land loss in the name of European ownership. In so doing, Shea Murphy convincingly connects Althusserian revisions of ideology, that which “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” while highlighting the (in)visibility of Native Dance as recuperative methods for Native American “theories” and “documents” as they have and continue to face acts of control and containment from state and cultural agents and apparatuses.

After a general overview of the text and conversation, Shea Murphy organizes her text into three disparate parts, “Restrictions, Regulations, Resiliences”, “Twentieth-Century Modern Dance”, and “Indigenous Choreographers Today”. Shea Murphy draws her data from a wide variety of sources, hegemonic to counter-hegemonic, governmental to popular, written to embodied signification, and anti-dance policies of the 19th century to contemporary participant-observation and interviews. Methodologically, Shea Murphy’s work is guided by two tenets: 1) to expand the narrow understanding of sources and archives that undergirds what she identifies as a colonizer’s arrogant process of “Playing Indian” (from DeLoria) and knowing the Other through representation (Shea Murphy self-identifies as non-Native American) 2) to take Native Dance as a valid source of knowledge and history in its own terms, without comparison to works otherwise canonized in Dance Studies. Although Shea Murphy states her valuing of artist intention, her interpretation of these documents seems to uncover many unintended significations and linkages to the political and spiritual historicity of oppression and racial struggle.

For example, Shea Murphy demonstrates that in culturally relative terms, Native Dance can be seen as different religious, social, recreational, story-telling and remembering practices embodied in personal and communal acts. By unearthing the rich archive of federal antidance policies dating back to 1882 and commentary dating years before this legislation, Shea Murphy shows how dance served to define Indianness in efforts of both containing threats to European, Christian ideologies about ‘proper’ documents, recording, spiritual, embodiment and economic practices. Over time, dominant rhetoric in legislation about Indian dance’s role shifted to accommodate contextual changes such that the purpose of authorizing and protecting white interests was perpetuated. In this sense, Native Dancing bodies was often (un)intentionally negotiated, defiant, underground, and/or rescripted to fit the needs of the agentive dancers and their communities.

Another important contribution Shea Murphy makes rests in framing Native Dance as a non-secular, non-Christian approach and worldview, not necessarily tied to the modern historical chronological mode of remembering the past. Such views account for Native Dance’s ability to create space or agency for Gods, spirits, and nonhuman forces. This rewrites previously privileged notions of agency (political) as dealt with in canonical race and ethnic studies texts. Additionally, Shea Murphy convincingly ties the increasing codification and management of Indianness, the efforts to denounce “fake” Indians and stage “real” “authentic” Indians, and contemporaneous movement theories to explore Delsartian and Native dancer’s notions of corporeality. Delsarte’s Christian-based theory sees individual bodily movement as the source of meaning, an expression of an emotional interiority/abstract, universal truth. The much criticized Delsartian attempt to codify a system of universal expression represented a shift from earlier Christian thought that claimed that the body could not effect change outside of itself, but also required isolation from communal action and turned away from story-telling as a main focus of bodily performance. By figuring movement as the “direct agent” of a soul, and dividing an individual’s inner “truth” of a soul from the act of interior expression externally, Delsartian notions set up the difficulty in audience’s interpretation of Native Dance as an act of communication to anything beyond the interior (i.e. kinship, spirits, nature) and the subsequent denouncement of such religiosity and “authenticity” claims of Native Dance and Indianness through institutions and popular culture (i.e. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West). The linkage in body theories genealogy between Delsarte, Native Dance, and Modern Dance forms the crucial nexus for Shea Murphy’s interventions on the many ways Native Dance was thought, embodied, and written into history.

Shea Murphy’s complex understanding of historic Native American dance choreographies and histories can inform the ways I think about Filipino dancing bodies in the U.S. Shea Murphy’s insights on different notions of time and space as represented in Native American dance and history (land loss/space available to dance) can open my definitions on contexts within which Filipinos dance. Also, Shea Murphy’s aversion of ethnographic pitfalls, paired historical and contemporary dance subject writing, and practical, particularist, political, non-neutral way of understanding dance as document/theory/tranformational/ancestral are useful models for my own investigations. Her notions of coembodiment (non-linear descent) and non-portrayal in dancing genealogy and performance provide disparate frameworks of dance from previous notions of propertied, owned, claimed, “acted” performance. Shea Murphy’s interpretation of Deloria’s argument on “Playing Indian” can be linked to Filipino studies scholar Alan Isaacs’ work on the boy scout narrative in Filipino American history and literature. Shea Murphy’s juxtaposition of early Christian and later Delsartian body ideologies versus Native Dance notions seem to parallel indigenous Filipino notions of ontology (loob/labas, an inner/outer dialectic) and power relations (utang na loob). Whereas Shea Murphy’s insight on Native Dance as historical and embodied document and personal transformational process, ancestral communication, and such all persuasively open up different comprehensions of the forces and powers of dance and different forms of agency for Native dancing bodies (historical, spiritual, political), the qualified power relations within Native Dance and how these Native power relations are theorized through such acts and documents seem like space that Shea Murphy’s analysis has room to grow. Additionally, because Shea Murphy’s investigation launches from questions of visibility (of ideological influence, of “absented” Indians, of Native American Dance in Modern Dance history) but importantly and repeatedly underscores the act of embodiment as a source of meaning, I wonder if the processes of racial formation for Native American dancers (and audiences of their representations) could be further complicated such that the performance of race is disrupted/buttressed/unaffected by the Native American concepts of time, spatiality, body, and movement. Perhaps it is because Shea Murphy’s text offers so many possibilities for imagining now-popular “worldviews” differently, it could influence a paradigmatic shift in the ways dance scholars think, write, and embody dance.

“ReVision by Forward Motion Theater” is a fresh innovative, seamless wedding of dance, theatre, music, and video that infuses every moment with intention, focus and psychological depth. It conducts a veritable symphony of human and physical elements and puts a cool frame around existential issues. Internationally acclaimed dancer Gessica Paperini stands out amongst others physically arresting and technically sublime performers. Trained extensively in contemporary dance, and post-modern choreography, Paperini is the epitome of kinaesthetic intelligence and intense physicality. Paperini dances with grace, sophistication and precision. Moreover, she moves a la Mary Wigman style hypnotizing the audience instantly, transcending the realm of the technically virtuous dancer and reclaiming dance as an expression of the soul. Paperini welds aerial lightness and extreme explosiveness, coupled by a mesmerizing presence and a very boutique driven style of performance. Paperini is capable of excavating the life of any character portrayed, capturing the nuances of the soul and clothing her kinaesthetic interpretations into an uber-modern dance style. She is a kinetic sculptor imbuing elegance with rigour, buoyancy with depth, animating her characters through the power of her vibrant and emotionally rich dance lexicon.

Keva Apostolova – Editor in Chief of Theatre Magazine

The William Forsythe Improvisation Technologies video series offers a fresh perspective on movement, improvisation and the intersections of dance and technology. The videos can best be described as an introduction to improvisation for dummies (beginners). Even as a non-beginner it is helpful to review the movement tools and techniques from the video with the useful and helpful graphics that clearly illustrate the techniques and objectives. Sometimes in classes it can be difficult to determine exactly what someone is doing movement wise and the movement can be mistaken for not having any clear objective, however these videos provide an alternative perspective. 

At the moment I am unsure how these videos influence my own work concerning technology but I was reminded of how simple choreography and movement generation can be. Sometimes I think it is necessary to reminded of the basics. 

Am I my resumé?

Am I even that person that goes by the name I call myself?

And how did FA get to be such a long, long way to run?

Weighty questions, not answerable by a Google search.

(Well maybe FA. That's Oscar Hammer-Styne trying to be clever.)

At the outset I would have said that I have been pretty much myself on-line. But my facebook page is rarely frequented by me, and when I do post, I generally try to be pithy. Pithy is not really me. I go on at length in person, and at even greater (endless) length in my own head. Sleep doesn't slow me down much, it just unleashed those demons of the id that want to rant and rave.

In the end, I decided that Googling "Ken Beck" did not shift my self concept very far. I was impressed by two of the "Ken Becks" that ain't me - the Boston Artist and the California writer - but this is not a mediated presence for ME.

My one whimsical, deliberate departure from literal interpretation of self is a significant one: I am jcraster on youtube. Craster was Lermontov's composer in "The Red Shoes," (Which Anton Walbrook pronounces 'shooss'). Walbrook's Lermontov gets all the great lines relating to Craster: "let's see what you can do in the way of a little REwriting." But Craster (Marius Goring) does get to say "you see this STICK! Follow it!!" He also gets the girl, if only for a short time. For me, taking up this identity is a way of acknowledging the hack work aspect of dance musicianship (or by extension, my career in general) which goes with the territory of collaborative work. Craster is my alter ego when I make work which is not up to par. The quality went out before the name when on.

Why did I take up that identity for youtube? I have not posted anything of questionable quality: my wedding video, a techno stunt in which I do about three significant things at once, and lately, three recordings of Edison records from my collection. Perhaps it frees me to be more mediated as a potentiality.

Who am I? I can't answer in a short form. Give me lebensraum: symphony or novel, body of work, a life. As a mediated presence, I get to inhabit some other plane: to be an actor.