Precious Camouflage

Precious Camouflage is a performative dance piece for four dancers and four live AI systems that explores the collaboration between human performers and AI agents.

AI agents produce content that looks realistic on an assembly-line scale—for example, images of people who could plausibly exist—yet always based on their training and their interpretation of human input. These two conditions determine the representation of (body-)political content and shape the probability of what becomes visible.

What does this mean in the context of movement and dance? How can the relationship between artistic dance practice and artificially intelligent systems take form when the generated dataset strives to appear as convincingly human as possible? In Precious Camouflage, four dancers from the New Human Body Society led by Charlotte Triebus work together with four live AI agents. The autonomous systems are capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting independently, influencing both the choreography and the live performance on stage. At the heart of the piece is a large installation composed of five LED elements, among which the dancers move on stage. Precious Camouflage draws the audience into an engagement with urgent questions surrounding the use, significance, potential, and misinterpretation of AI.

Under the artistic direction of Charlotte Triebus, Precious Camouflage was created in close collaboration with the MIREVI Lab at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and vobe.digital.