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The Living Archive is an experiment between Studio Wayne McGregor and Google Arts and Culture - a tool for choreography powered by machine learning which generates original movement inspired by Wayne's 25-year archive.
Alongside the Living Archive project Williams created a suspended video installation for a live performance titled Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment. Williams collaborated with Google Arts and Culture to create abstract visualizations of AI generated choreography which explores ideas of dance as code and vice versa. Without privileging his own human lens Williams attempted not to make a distinction between what would traditionally be considered ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’. Through this, it raises questions about the new aesthetics that AI presents to us, that don’t necessarily conform to our values, guiding us to challenge the way we look at the world.
Image: The Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment, 2019; installed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles.
Cold Flux is a three-channel AI generated video installation created from footage Williams filmed of the Larsen-B Ice shelf whilst on an expedition to Antarctica with polar explorer Robert Swan. The ice shelf splintered off from the Antarctic peninsula in 2002 and has been disintegrating since. The footage was used to train machine learning algorithms to generate the video landscapes which visually seemingly exist within a state of melting and freezing, forming and un-forming. The resulting video is strange and uncanny, a familiar yet distant landscape, a prediction or a recording with echoes of the sublime. Cut into this video landscape is AI generated video of the surface of the sun; synthetic and uncertain. The work presents to us the new digital materiality that is starting to exist alongside our own, while exploring its relationship to the natural. Accompanying the video is a haunting audio track by musician Gaika. The track is delicate, yet strong, digital but also human. A slow tracking shot shows the sides of the icebergs, while the vast blocks of ice also move within the shots themselves. The imagery moves from the recognisable to the indistinguishable, flowing and morphing within the steady frame. The camera looking at the sun is static, with the sun continually rotating within the frame, something seemingly impossible. The work maps the complex network between technology, environmental change and our understanding of the world.
Image: Cold Flux, 2021; exhibited at Somerset House, London
Sodium highlights our evolving relationship to technology within our cities and the impact upon our lived experience and environmental systems. It explores the ambiguous period of transitioning through dusk and speculates on possible alternate strange realities through combining outdated technology with new fabrication methods. Housed within an aluminium structure three sodium lights power on and off intermittently creating a space which is undefined, resulting in a performative moment between object and person. Alongside sits a dark pool of water which acts as a portal, a window to the future or a dark reflection of the present.
Autobiography, a contemporary dance production by choreographer Wayne McGregor, is an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life and writing, a non-linear approach to a life story refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures. The scenography created for the work encompasses a kinetic suspended aluminium lattice structure with interwoven light bars. The modular geometric layout references cells and scientific models. Conceived as an autonomous machine it traps and alters space, creating ever changing undefined environments, raising questions about how we perceive the human figure in relation to space and the constantly shifting terrains and states of being that we, as humans, exist in. Alongside this are a series of projectors which act as archives of light information analogous to the human body as genetic archive. This information is released through beams of light at different intervals throughout the work.