Living Archive, 2019
Video installation
LED screen.
The Music Centre, Los Angeles.
In collaboration with Google’s Arts and Culture Lab, Studio Wayne McGregor has developed the Living Archive — an artificially intelligent choreographic tool, trained on hundreds of hours of video from the choreographer’s extensive back catalogue as well as solo material created on each of the current company.
From what it has learned about the individual physical styles of an array of bodies dancing McGregor’s choreography, the system is able to respond to any new movement phrase by suggesting multiple original possibilities for the next phrase. Through swift real-time dialogue between wo/man and machine, the Living Archive unleashes the creative movement potential stored at molecular level within former works, amplifying the spectrum of possibility for choreographic decision- making and bringing dancers of the present into contact with traces of their predecessors. Ben Cullen Williams’ design manipulates abstract visualizations of the AI generated choreography into a suspended video installation which explores ideas of dance as code and vice versa.
See the online tool Ben Cullen Williams created in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture here.
