Irini Kalaitzidi: Feeding Birds

“Feeding Birds” is a research project that attempts the poetic use of artificial intelligence (AI) in dance reading/viewing. The project involves the development of an archive of dance phrases being used as a dataset to train a Human Action Recognition (HAR) model. This technology, originally created to serve military surveillance practices, functions here as a poetic device that arranges human actions and dubs them with labels such as “feeding birds” or “folding napkins”. The dataset used to train the AI model is what will ultimately determine how the model itself will (mis)interpret the world, which label to assign to which action. Feeding it with the dataset is a process of shaping the model’s dancing memories and biases.

This research will lead to a performative act where humans and AI open a bodily and verbal conversation, like in a Telephone game where each side proposes a different reading of the same stage reality. A human dances and an AI model observes and assigns a label to the action it detects. The model returns this label back to the human as a choreographic score for his next action. A chain of successive translations: action-label-action-label and so on. In this work, the AI is invited to discuss the dancing body and trigger reflection on the ways in which we see and interpret dance.