Operator: On Generative Choreography
Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Operator: On Generative Choreography
Hosted by the Coding Lab of the University of Applied Arts Vienna
Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice,
known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as ‘the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages’ (Clot
Magazine) and ‘LGBT power couple’ (Flaunt), their expertises collide in large scale conceptual works recognizable for their
poetic approach to technology. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and Human Computer Interaction technologist, and Catherine’s
as a choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium non-allegiant output, bringing together
environments, technology and the body. In fall 2021 the duo began a translation of themes from their Lumen Prize-winning work
‘I’d rather be in a dark silence’ into the Privacy Collection, exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain
technology.
Join Operator’s Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti for an
in depth and process-focused lecture about their recent work in on-chain generative choreography, contextualized within their
history of integrating advanced technologies in their experiential practice. The duo trace the roots of their generative choreography
process to Merce Cunningham’s ‘chance dance’ method, the history of computational choreography, the E.A.T. (Experiments in
Art and Technology) Movement of the 1960s, as well as embodied approaches to human machine collaboration as pioneered by early
women in digital art. The work starts and ends with the human body; their custom generative model creates choreographic sequences
from a movement library made by the artists, then each unique sequence drives compositional elements that determine the final
visual output. This series and experiment in embodied generative art is planned to release on Art Blocks in Spring 2023, and
culminates in a live performance of all sequences generated by the model. The experience of the work from minting to the performance
is designed to be a slow recovery of the human.
Operator has been awarded a Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC
Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve been
speakers at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, Art Basel, ZKM, MIT Open Doc Lab, BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Ars Electronica,
Contemporary Istanbul, and CADAF.
(Talk in English)
