Mission
CRCI explores the braid of choreography, computation, and surveillance through an interdisciplinary lens. Our aim is to counter the violence of body-surveilling and algorithmic technologies by channeling resources to artists, organizers and scholars who center bodies and computation in their work for social justice.
Vision
CRCI engages the expertise of a wildly diverse and intimidatingly heterogeneous group of critics, theorists, computer scientists, dancers, roboticists, ethnographers, poets, designers, improvisers, and organizers, among others. We develop programming that makes time and space for sustained dialogue and collaborative movement, traversing disparate frames of knowledge.
In doing this, CRCI aims to create curriculum and community committed to making productive interventions in the development of emerging art and technologies. These interventions can take the form of creative works, curricular design, human / computer and human / robot interfaces, publications, and conversations. Our intention is to expand this work to foster equitably collaborative research projects, policy work, and expansive digital programming.
Choreography as Processing & Computation
Historically, choreography—from the Greek khoreia (collective group movement) and the English suffix -graphy (to write)—has referred to the planned movements of dancers and the encoding and decoding of bodily motion through space and time.
We understand choreography as functioning as a mode of processing and computation. From gestural human-computer interfaces like the “swipe” and “pinch-to-zoom” to the subtle interplay between bodies and surveilling technologies—social media, drones, robots, and satellites—our movements are continuously shaped and tracked. These technologies not only structure our navigation through space and time but also extract vast amounts of data, implicating our bodies in the well-documented abuses of surveillance capitalism.
History
The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) was founded by Sydney Skybetter at Brown University in 2015 to consider the intrinsic risks and creative possibilities of surveillant computational systems. The convening’s participants-- with expertise in choreography, digital art, interface design, hardware hacking, ethnography, data science, facilitation and software design-- gather annually to collectively consider productive interventions in emerging technologies with the belief that bringing artistic intelligences to engineering will make the world more equitable, sustainable, and embracing of creative discourse. Read about the founding of CRCI »