Experts & Artists Talk Digital Performances

The discourse format offers four lectures introducing into topics:

The Choreography of Algorithms
Tech Imaginaries: Shamanism and Spiritual Practices
Sensual Interfaces and Touch in VR
Mutual Embodiments and the Skin of the Screen

After the lectures, visitors can choose from four conversations between speakers and artists, each focusing on one of the respective topics.

14:30–16:30 Lectures
Introduction
Kate Sicchio
Joulia Strauss
Lisa May Thomas
Laura U. Marks

16:30–17:30 Talks (happening simultaneously)
Joana Chicau, Kate Sicchio. Moderation: Paloma Oliveira
Choy Ka Fai, Joulia Strauss, Moderation: Fabiane M. Borges
Robin Jonsson, Lisa May Thomas. Moderation: Karen Toftegaard
Ligia Lewis, Laura U. Marks. Moderation: Rizvana Bradley

Joana Chicau, Kate Sicchio. Moderation: Paloma Oliveira

Joana Chicau
Joana Chicau is a designer and researcher – with a background in dance. In her practice, she researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences are presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating in and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

Kate Sicchio
Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real time systems. Her work has been shown internationally in the US, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK. She co-edited the book Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice: Techne/Technique/Technology (Routledge) with Camille Baker. She has presented work at many conferences and symposia including SIGCHI, ISEA, ACM Creativity and Cognition, and Dance Studies Association.

Paloma Oliveira
Paloma Oliveira is a wholehearted explorer curator, software engineer and artist critically thinking code as a powerful creative tool to reshape our present and future, and preserve, accessibility, equity, sustainability and human access to democracy. She is an open source philosophy and social justice advocate as well as co-founder of the Zentrum für Netzkunst (Berlin’s netart institute), PyLadies Berlin co-organizer, FrauenLoop mentor.

Choy Ka Fai, Joulia Strauss, Moderation: Fabiane M. Borges

Choy Ka Fai
Choy Ka Fai is a Berlin-based Singaporean artist. His multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance. At the heart of his research is a continuous exploration of the metaphysics of the human body. Through research expeditions, pseudo-scientific experiments and documentary performances, Choy Ka Fai appropriates technologies and narratives to imagine new futures of the human body. Choy Ka Fai’s projects have been presented in major institutions and festivals worldwide, including Sadler’s Wells, ImPulsTanz Festival, Tanz im August and Tanzplattform Germany.

Joulia Strauss
Joulia Strauss is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. Born as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures, she lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Joulia Strauss stands for a chord of artistic media, resonating in a deep bond with philosophy, technology and the ongoing relovution for the world beyond Empire. Her works have been shown at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, at Tate Modern, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and documenta14, among others. Together with Friedrich Kittler, Peter Berz, and Peter Weibel, she is the editor of Krytyka Polityczna, and with Wilhelm Fink she has edited Götter und Schriften rund ums Mittelmeer.

Fabiane M. Borges
Fabiane Morais Borges is a graduate, master and doctor in Clinical Psychology and researcher. Her work focuses on the articulation between art, technology and subjectivity. She is currently developing a research platform in Space Art and Culture at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil, funded by the Institutional Training Program within the INPE & Sociedade project. Fabiane M. Borges is a collaborator of the DIVERSITAS/FFLCH/USP nucleus and an organizer of the international festival of Technoshamanism as well as author of the book with the same title.

Robin Jonsson, Lisa May Thomas. Moderation: Karen Toftegaard

Robin Jonsson
Robin Jonsson studied at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm as well as at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels where he graduated in 2008. Since then, he has toured his works, which have spanned computer-games, puppetry, animation and monsters. Robin Jonsson is known for his choreographic works, evolving around the interaction between man and machine. Above all, he shows human beings through and in the machine. His work focuses on genuine human contact that is made possible thanks to digital technology.

Lisa May Thomas
Dance and film artist Lisa May Thomas works at the intersection of performance and technology. Her practice and research investigate how digital technologies mediate physical and non-physical interactions between human and nonhuman bodies and environments. With her works she explores ways in which digital tools (such as VR) can be used to develop performance experiences, which challenge expectations and habituations of technology and the body. Lisa May Thomas is a QuestLab Network Artist for Studio Wayne McGregor in London, and resident at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol.

Karen Toftegaard
Karen Toftegaard has been a cultural entrepreneur in Copenhagen for 20 years, developing cultural events, festivals and an award-winning outdoor gallery. In 2021 she founded Denmark’s first festival for digital first theatre – RE:LOCATIONS. Starting out in a municipal culture institution she later moved on to the large theatres Camp X and Republique. Today Karen Toftegaard is the founding director of a PR company and of the production and promotion company WILDTOPIA. Since 2017 she has led the creation of the international days at CPH STAGE, Denmark’s annual festival for performing arts.

Ligia Lewis, Laura U. Marks. Moderation: Rizvana Bradley

Ligia Lewis
Ligia Lewis works as a choreographer and performer. Through choreography and an embodied practice, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Her choreographic work slides between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space(s) for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant.

Laura U. Marks
Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy. Her new book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos is under contract with Duke University Press. Among her theoretical contributions is the concept of haptic visuality, according to which a spectator’s contact with media is conceived of as touching, as opposed to seeing. Along with Azadeh Emadi, she is a founding member of the Substantial Motion Research Network. Marks is Grant Strate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Rizvana Bradley
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her monograph, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Her scholarship has appeared in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, Rhizomes, Women and Performance, and TDR. She has also curated academic arts symposia at the BFI, the Serpentine, and the Stedelijk.