The C shape of your hand like peanut butter on the roof of my mouth (2022).

Performed Thursday 8th December 2022 at the Bonnie Bird Theatre

Choreographed by Gian Sanghera Warren in collaboration with:

Alexandra Bierlaire
Chiara Halter
Beatrice Casassa
Nicol Archontides
GPT-3

Costume design by Morwenna Hope with Lighting design by Steph.

This work formed the beginning of a year-long research into the use of artificial intelligence software as a collaborative tool within a choreographic practice. It investigates the body and mind as archival sites for personal bodily sensations, queered and made collective by utilising machine learning programs built on human data. Partly informed by Jose Estaban Muñoz’s concept of queerness, defined as “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world”.

The process embraces contradiction, engaging with a collaborator devoid of explicit gender, sex or physical form (yet still trained with human biases) to simultaneously investigate embodied notions of sense memory. The work was created using GPT-3 (a language software) to generate guided meditations as a method of accessing sensation, as well as creating essay based text to inform movement creation. It is structured by visuals generated using the DALL-E outpainting tool from photographs of the creative process. Set to a sound score featuring tracks by Planet 1999, Yona, SOPHIE and Holly Herndon (ft. Jlin & Spawn), alongside the altered voices of the dancers.

Link to footage