Above: Aleatory choreographic compositional matrix, GICA embodied research/creation project 2025,,
Schroedinger's Black Box
Embodied Practices
in the age of the
Machinic Phylum
GICA's Embodied Practices Project investigates the relationship between human performance and what philosopher Manuel De Landa describes as the “machinic phylum”: the continuous flow of material and informational processes between organic and mechanical systems that re-organzies both. Positioned between performance studies, cognitive science, and speculative aesthetics, the project asks how embodied and disembodied aesthetics overlap and differ, and how cultural boundaries assert themselves in the context of algorithmic production.
The ongoing debate over the merits of embodied artistic work relative to the output of LLMs, aside from the emotional involvement it often elicits, involves certain assertions and assumptions related to both human and non-human modes of creation. As Theodore Sturgeon once put it, perhaps not without reason: “90 percent of everything is crap.” Applying this premise equally on human and non-human artistic production, and using Heidegger’s proposition that the work is separate from its material and utilitarian foundation, what supports the proposition that humanly ‘embodied’ work is inherently superior?
Using a range of strategies that include ‘real’ and imaginary discussions, scripts, scores and ‘reviews’ of ( sometimes unrealized) performances, the project proposes the body not as separate from technology, but as entangled with its assemblages and languages. The resulting documents function simultaneously as artworks, propositions, and diagrams of possible relations between bodies, machines, and their impact on collective experience.
Excerpts from
an imaginary Dialogue
... E: “You speak about embodiment as if physicality automatically produces meaning. But history is filled with humans making terrible art. AI changes the conditions of cultural production because it can synthesize more references, more histories, more forms than any human nervous system could ever contain. Why cling to the body’s limits as sacrosanct?”
M: “Because the body and its limits is not the point. Vulnerability is. Presence is. An embodied artwork is inseparable from mortality. When a dancer collapses onstage, when a singer’s voice cracks, when an audience shares air with a performer — culture becomes reciprocal. AI-generated work can imitate the appearance of intensity, but it cannot stake anything.”
E: “But the 'stakes' in theatre are just a studied fiction. Isn’t that romanticism masquerading as ethics, while pretending that the hard problem doesn’t exist? Fallibility does not equate authenticity — otherwise why harp on AI getting the number of fingers in a picture wrong? An audience experiences patterns, rhythm, image, gesture, not the inner state of an actor or a dancer. AI can produce those patterns — not always well, but the same is true for human performers. Besides, most audiences already consume culture as mediated data. Cinema, streaming music, photography, virtual reality — all these have severed culture from bodily immediacy long ago.”
M: “But those technologies still index bodies and their shared conditions. A photograph records light reflecting from a world that existed. A performance document points back to lived duration. AI systems generate without necessity. They produce culture without ever needing to encounter hunger, ecstasy, grief, aging, or death. The work becomes statistically persuasive rather than existentially necessary.”
E: “ The appeal to the real, the ‘lived world’ is naive. Painting parted company with the ‘real’ from its beginnings. Photographs ceased to function as ‘authentic’ record with the airbrush and Photoshop. Music has no source in the ‘real’ except by allusion and the materiality of its production. An artwork is a proposition, not an ethical imperative an audience must accept just because its source is a human. AI simply reveals that cultural meaning has always been collaborative projection. The viewer completes the work.”
M: “No. AI reveals something else: that we are becoming comfortable with simulations of relation. Embodied arts resist efficiency precisely because bodies are inefficient. A theatre rehearsal wastes time. A sculptor develops calluses. A vocalist loses breath. Those frictions are not obstacles to culture — they are culture. They remind us that meaning emerges through limits.”
E: “Limits that exclude any number of audiences — privilege, language, access, framing are all products of well-established hierarchies that ‘embodied’ art upholds, even when it claims to be critical. AI may not be able to stub its toe, be hungry or feel lovesick and transmit that to evoke my sympathy. But that is not the point. AI destabilizes cultural hierarchy and hegemony. It can even democratize some aspects of art making similar to the way the internet did.“
M: “But democratization is not synonymous with depth. The danger is that AI transforms culture into infinite stylistic liquidity: endless recombination without consequence. Everything becomes available, and therefore nothing remains difficult enough to transform us.”
E: “Transformation is a conscious experience, not a ritual assertion. That is why religion must constantly resort to conceptual or physical violence to maintain its hold. And consciousness changes as culture changes. Iron cuts bronze, steel cuts iron. Writing, the ancients complained, destroyed men’s memory. Film subverted lived experience, recorded sound obliterated ‘relationality’. A teenager inhabits hybrid realities where digital systems shape memory, intimacy, language, and perception. AI-generated work might simply be the first genuinely post-human art form — one no longer centered on the mythology of the solitary expressive individual.”
M: “Is that not exactly what we should be terrified by? Embodied art insists that consciousness is finite, situated, and fragile. A dancer ages. A painter’s hand trembles. A performer forgets lines. The artwork carries traces of those limitations. AI culture risks removing tragedy from aesthetics. It creates the fantasy of infinite production detached from consequence.”
E: “It strikes me as ironic that limitations are touted as ennobling, when human culture will stop at nothing to declare its superiority over all of nature. We know that whales have language and we turn them into motor oil and steak. AI is a human artefact, but one that for the first time challenges our mental and not just physical superiority.”
M: "Hold on — superiority has nothing to do with it...
The queue outside the former marine supply warehouse on Vancouver’s industrial waterfront looked less like the audience for a dance performance than suburbanites lining up for a temporary evacuation. People in rain-soaked jackets stood silently beneath sodium lights while tugboats moved through the harbour behind them. The work, titled Low Tide Index, by the North False Creek Movement Assembly, unfolded less as choreography than as a slow civic malfunction.
Inside, the space had been left mostly raw. Damp concrete, exposed conduit, intermittent condensation dripping from steel beams. A faint smell of cedar mulch and machine oil circulated through the room. The audience sat on movable plastic pallets while stagehands periodically repositioned entire sections of viewers during the performance with the indifference of a Costco warehouse crew. This constant displacement became the evening’s first choreographic principle: spectatorship as labour under unstable conditions.
The dancers entered, and at first one mistook them for technicians. Wearing reflective rain gear and carrying long aluminum poles, they moved with the detachment of municipal workers surveying flood damage. Gradually, however, their gestures belied their apparent utility. Measuring, lifting, dragging began to repeat themselves until abstracted and estranged from practical purpose. The performance’s intelligence emerged precisely there, in a liminal membrane between work and ritual.
One of the most striking sequences involved twelve performers slowly constructing a temporary floor from warped plywood sheets while a recording of coastal weather reports played overhead. The choreography refused climax. Instead, exhaustion accumulated as aesthetic material. The effect recalled aspects of postmodern dance associated with Yvonne Rainer, though filtered through the environmental anxiety specific to contemporary Vancouver.
What distinguished Low Tide Index from the familiar rhetoric of “immersive performance” was its resistance to seducing the audience. Midway through the evening the heating system was shut off entirely, and the temperature in the warehouse dropped noticeably while the dancers continued methodically carrying sandbags from one end of the building to the other. The gesture could have been unbearably literal — climate adaptation as dance metaphor — yet the sheer duration transformed it into something stranger and more psychologically charged.
The sound design avoided any cinematic tendencies, relying on industrial HVAC ambience merged with amplified field recordings from construction sites and underground parking garages. At times it became impossible to distinguish environmental sound from the actual building itself.
The performance’s final image bordered on absurdity yet felt unexpectedly moving. After nearly two hours of accumulated logistical actions, the dancers carefully assembled dozens of orange traffic pylons into a rough approximation of a mountain range across the floor. Fog drifted in from industrial humidifiers. A single emergency exit sign glowed green behind the arrangement. Nothing “happened” afterward. The audience simply stared at this temporary landscape while harbour foghorns sounded faintly outside.
In lesser hands, such imagery would collapse into west-coast melancholia or fashionable ecological pessimism. Yet Low Tide Index possessed enough formal discipline to avoid sentimentality. Its achievement lay in understanding Vancouver not as picturesque scenery but as an unstable interface between extraction, infrastructure, weather, and speculative capital. The dancers appeared less as expressive individuals than as temporary custodians of systems already beginning to fail.
One left the warehouse uncertain whether one had witnessed a dance work, an endurance exercise, or a municipal rehearsal for future catastrophe. That uncertainty was precisely the point.
Project 005.026.05.031
Low Tide Index
Dance Theatre, 2026
Above: Male écorché anatomical chalk study, Charles Landseer, 1815, Wellcome Collection, London
By the time the audience entered the upstairs gallery at Western Front, the smell had already colonized the building. Not unpleasant exactly — warm, floral, faintly fermented — but dense enough to feel almost architectural. The performance, Reserve Capacity, by the fictional artist Mara Ellingsen, transformed honey from symbol into atmosphere, adhesive, burden, and metabolic threat.
The premise appeared deceptively simple. Over six uninterrupted hours, Ellingsen attempted to transport nearly three hundred kilograms of raw blackberry honey from one side of the gallery to the other using only her body and a set of improvised fabric harnesses. The honey was stored in transparent industrial containers suspended from the ceiling at varying heights. Each transfer required the artist to climb, siphon, carry, pour, rebalance, and repeat. Nothing in the performance resembled theatrical illusion. The labour was real, inefficient, and visibly damaging.
At first the audience treated the event like an installation. People circulated quietly, wine glasses in hand, observing the amber viscosity catching the light from the large north-facing windows. But endurance performance gradually alters spectatorship itself. Within an hour, viewers began slowing down. Conversations diminished. One became attentive to duration, to fatigue, to the grotesque mathematics of repeated physical effort.
Honey proved an inspired material choice precisely because of its contradictory symbolic weight. It carries associations of preservation, sweetness, pastoral abundance, and collective labour. Yet in Reserve Capacity, honey behaved less like nourishment than like industrial matter. It stuck to floors, hardened onto skin, soaked through clothing, attracted heat and debris. Ellingsen’s body became progressively coated in crystallizing residue until she resembled not a performer but a partially fossilized worker excavated from an unknown agricultural disaster.
The most difficult sequence occurred midway through the evening. After repeated lifting, the artist’s right shoulder visibly began to fail. Her arm trembled violently whenever tension entered the harness system. Rather than conceal the deterioration, the performance reorganized itself around incapacity. Transfers slowed from minutes to nearly half an hour each. Audience members shifted uncomfortably between empathy and voyeurism. One sensed the room collectively negotiating the ethics of watching someone continue beyond reasonable physical limits.
The piece inevitably recalled earlier endurance practices associated with Marina Abramović and Tehching Hsieh, though Ellingsen’s work rejected the ascetic severity that often accompanies that lineage. Instead, Reserve Capacity remained stubbornly materialist. The performance was less about transcendence than about bodily negotiation with substance, weight, friction, sugar, and exhaustion. The honey functioned not metaphorically but operationally.
Particularly effective was the sound environment by fictional composer Joel Ramm, who amplified microscopic audio from the honey itself: bubbles collapsing, viscosity shifting, slow internal movement within heated containers. These sounds merged with Ellingsen’s breathing and the subtle noises of strain — fabric tightening, joints cracking, shoes peeling away from sticky floors. By the final hours, the gallery sounded less like an art space than a malfunctioning food-processing facility.
What prevented the work from collapsing into mere spectacle was its refusal of catharsis. No symbolic breakthrough arrived. No triumphant completion redeemed the suffering on display. In fact, the final transfer failed outright. One container slipped during lowering, spilling honey catastrophically across the concrete floor. The artist simply sat down in the expanding pool, breathing heavily, unable or unwilling to continue. House lights remained unchanged. Audience members quietly began leaving.
That unresolved ending gave the performance its disturbing resonance. Reserve Capacity was ultimately less concerned with endurance than with depletion — ecological, physical, emotional, economic. Honey, ordinarily fetishized as natural purity, became a concentrated archive of labour: floral labour, insect labour, agricultural labour, bodily labour. Ellingsen transformed sweetness into an index of extraction.
Leaving the Western Front afterward, one noticed that the smell lingered on clothing long after the performance ended. It felt less like documentation than contamination.
Project 005.023.06.001
Reserve Capacity
Performance Art, 2025
Peter Dittmer’s Die Amme anticipated many of the dynamics now associated with AI-generated art, but it did so by making the audience’s participation unusually visible, uncomfortable, and reciprocal.
In Die Amme (1992–2005), viewers entered into a text-based dialogue with a machine that responded through an evolving archive of prior conversations. The work’s “personality” emerged from accumulated audience interactions: Dittmer selectively incorporated fragments of previous exchanges into the system’s linguistic repertoire. The installation therefore functioned less as a static artwork than as a social and conversational ecology. (The Poetry Foundation)
What distinguishes Die Amme from much contemporary AI-generated work is the degree to which the audience becomes implicated in the construction of the system itself. The viewer is not simply prompting a machine to produce an image or text; the viewer is effectively training, provoking, and psychologically shaping the machine over time. The installation stages a feedback loop between human aggression, curiosity, boredom, humour, and machinic response. The famous act of the machine spilling a glass of milk becomes a performative reward, almost like an emotional outburst that audiences attempt to trigger through manipulation or rhetorical pressure. (The Poetry Foundation)
This differs from most contemporary AI image generators and large language models, where audience participation is simultaneously broader and more opaque. AI-generated works today often depend on massive, invisible datasets and distributed user interactions. The audience contributes prompts, ratings, and behavioural data, but these contributions are abstracted into statistical optimization processes. Users participate continuously, yet their participation is concealed behind corporate infrastructures and machine-learning architectures.
By contrast, Die Amme theatricalizes participation. The audience can perceive the relationship between input and response, frustration and reaction. Dittmer exposes the instability of dialogue between human and machine instead of smoothing it into seamless utility. The work foregrounds failure, stubbornness, repetition, and irritation. In this sense, the audience encounters the machine not as an efficient servant but as an adversarial or resistant interlocutor.
There is also a crucial difference in authorship. Many AI-generated artworks today position the user as a “prompt author,” someone who directs generative systems toward aesthetic outputs. In Die Amme, however, authorship is radically dispersed. Dittmer designed the framework, but the language emerged from accumulated conversations, accidental exchanges, and iterative social contamination. The audience does not merely consume the work; it becomes sedimented inside the work.
This makes Die Amme closer to a living archive of social behaviour than to contemporary generative spectacle. While today’s AI systems often aim for fluency and frictionless realism, Dittmer’s installation emphasized awkwardness and rhetorical tension. The audience became aware not only of the machine’s artificiality, but also of its own compulsive desire to anthropomorphize, dominate, or emotionally engage with the system.
In retrospect, Die Amme appears remarkably prescient. It anticipated contemporary concerns around conversational AI, emergent machine personality, participatory training, and the blurred boundary between user and system. Yet unlike many current AI works, it transformed audience involvement into the central aesthetic material of the artwork itself.
Project 005.023.06.001
Die Amme/The Wetnurse
Installation, 1992-2005
Note: This is a 'real' work
