Announcing BCNM's 2024 Faculty Seed Grant Recipient
This semester, the Berkeley Center for New Media was thrilled to support one faculty member in their scholarship through a seed grant that will help catalyze their research in new media. We are excited to congratulate this amazing artist!
Lisa Wymore
0 ⏎ remake
From 2015-2017, Lisa's dance company Disappearing Acts, an artistic collective of dance makers, performers, and intermedia artists, created a new work entitled 0 ⏎. The performance was a computer augmented improvisational score with the goal of creating a new mode of improvisational performance that would allow the computer to be a co-choreographer in the artistic work. Read more about the piece here. This dance piece was made years before Generative AI and LLM’s became ubiquitous in a wide range of creative practices. Using custom software that generated the video projections, audio and music for the performance from a series of small data sets that were fed into the program, the computer became an “engaged” participant in the work. The performers were challenged to improvise with the computer as it algorithmically derived commands and inserted projections that impacted the dance and the dancers’ choices during the performance.
The original intention for 0 ⏎ was the derived from a desire to experiment with creating generative choreography. The artist collective wanted to explore the impact that real-time computer augmented commands and choreographic strategies would have on the act of dance improvisation. For example: What happens when they give the computer agency to control our movement choices? What happens if they allow themselves to collaborate with the computer to create improvisational performance? How does this impact the performer's sense of agency? What they have discovered with this particular project is that an ongoing relationship develops with the computer and the human dancers receiving the commands, and vice versa through iterative tweaking of the commands fed back into the computer. For the performers, the algorithms feel like they are intentionally making choices within the performance alongside the dancers. This has opened up many discussions for us about how they might work with Generative AI to make a new version of 0 ⏎ that continues to explore more co-choreographic experiences with the computer.
For this Seed Fund project, entitled 0 ⏎ remake, Lisa wants to revisit 0 ⏎ now that Generative AI and LLM’s are so easily accessible. She sees the work in conversation with other improvisational scores that were created by influential dance artists such as Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s The R.S.V.P. Cycles, which are understood to be a series of iterative feedback tools used for community-centered performance and design, and Yvonne Rainer’s piece entitled Continuous Project--Altered Daily in which the piece was performed and re-performed over many months with the intention of learning from iterative feedback loops in relationship to material objects and other resources found in the performance spaces. For 0 ⏎ remake, the choreographic structure does not privilege human expressiveness over task-based computer commands. They originally performed the piece for approximately ten minutes. As the piece became a stand-alone work, they began to perform it in installation-like settings and at various conferences and dance festivals. The time frame for the piece has expanded to forty minutes and can be expanded to longer durations or shortened - depending on the parameters we set up for the piece with the computer. The dancers have changed as well, though three dancers Ian Heisters, Sheldon B. Smith, and Lisa Wymore have performed in every version of the work thus far. In June 2017 the piece was performed in London at Goldsmith University as part of MOCO, the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing with dance artists Marc Stevenson, and Anne-Gaëlle.
For the BCNM Seed Fund, Lisa will be bringing 0 ⏎ remake to the Creativity Conference at Southern Oregon University (May 15-18, 2025) - adapting the piece with Generative AI tools, and preparing the piece to be shared within a conference setting, which will involve setting up the work as an interactive installation performance and creating an interactive workshop.
The goal of presenting the work is to add to the discourse on human creativity in the age of Generative AI by making an interactive, embodied, real-time experimental installation that will invite a wide array of creatively inclined people to engage with the system. Questions that Lisa is asking: What new sets of data will be interesting to plug into the system, where will derive the data, and how can we utilize data ethically within the system? What images and sounds will be co-created with the computer (and participants) and utilized to spark new creative choices within the installation? Once the piece is up and running, Lisa hopes to bring it to other conferences, festivals, institutions, and performance venues both nationally and internationally.