This perceptual live-coding spectacle at London venue, UglyDuck, both involves and intrigues. Moving Photon sets up a multimodal stage-space wherein the limits of computational strategies as solely numerical abstractions are addressed through an embodied gathering of sensory agents.

In an intimate, crepuscular setting, the audience shares the floor with a light-tube installation which is computationally embedded with multiple Raspberry Pi microprocessors. These interactive components are openly displayed, involving the viewer in their processes and, through preregistration, audience members also have the chance to connect to wearable sensors; to step inside the ’photon’ and join the performance.

And through these live data readings from EEG brainwave recordings and wearable sensors, outputs from the audience’s cortical receptive fields blend with the performer’s intuitive gestures, creating a solo dance show which reflects upon a simultaneity of social isolation and technological connectivity – apposite in the context of the pandemic and the effects of remote-working.

The performance shows echoes of Paul M Churchland’s (1986) theories of cognitive phenomena, in which sensorimotor activity has been a reference for simulating virtual sensations of body movements. The environment staged by Moving Photon externalises those internal representations of perception where the ‘state-space’, here ‘stage-space’, becomes a neural matrix tangled in signals of tangible live modalities. Almost in counterpoint to Churchland’s neurocomputational simulations, which grapple towards targeted calculations (Churchland, 1986), Moving Photon presents a show receptive to the unpredictability of live presence, in which a holistic topography of elements are coordinated.

Expect to be drawn into a powerfully emotive journey, led by dancer Seirian Griffiths, whose movements embrace the multi-layered signals circulating the ‘photon’ to generate a collective intimacy of isolation and connectivity between all those in the room. And these entwined layers of performer, audience, and technology compel speculation on the agency of each individual component. Does the dancer dictate movements to the machine, or is it the other way around? Is brain scan data oscillating the ambient light and sound? Are the dancer’s movements his own? This programmed interactivity could, perhaps, even be registered as a predictable ensemble.

But, might duetting with a human dancer have provoked a different improvisation? Seirian's response to this question reveals a core concept underpinning the show and its dialogue on human-machine collaboration: ‘A human dancer is more unpredictable than any machine can be.’ Indeed, the predictability of the technology here is a stable factor which aids Seirian to compartmentalise and work out the possible trajectories forming within this stage-space.

But beyond the complexities of computational methods, Moving Photon does unsettle the behaviour of usual algorithmic protocols by incorporating live embodiment. Its non-reductive algorithmic collaboration introduces new elements onto the stage-space. In this show, the audience is not only granted entry to a spectacle but also to an embodied experience. Perhaps, even, to become performers themselves.

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References:

Churchland, P. (1986). Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology. In M. Boden (Ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 334-367 ). Oxford.

FRIENDRED: MOVING PHOTON PREVIEW

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