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Embodying the Artificial examines how dance creation unfolds in dialogue with generative AI and related technologies. Grounded in ethnographic research, the book focuses on the kinesthetic dimensions of human–AI interaction to explore how generative systems reshape the creation and performance of dance. Through analyses of choreographic practices involving AI avatars and other intelligent technologies, the author interrogates the ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions that arise when machines become creative partners—challenging established notions of dance, embodiment, and creativity.
Bridging theory and practice, this research offers conceptual and methodological foundations for understanding human–AI interaction in dance. It introduces a clear framework for categorizing interdisciplinary creative processes with various kinds of machines and provides choreographers and movement artists with tools to navigate, design, and reflect on co-creative processes with artificial agents.
Thoughtfully conceived and comprehensive in scope, this book is poised to make a significant and enduring contribution across multiple fields, including dance and performance studies, media and digital studies, and interdisciplinary research. Comparable work in this area is limited – Embodying the Artificial is a thorough and authoritative survey of the topic, presented in a manner that is both engaging and accessible.
Diego Marin-Bucio (PhD, University of Oslo) is a performing artist and dance researcher whose work bridges choreography, technology, and philosophy. Shortlisted for the One Dance UK Awards 22’, he has been Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK, and Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, Spain.
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Technology and Dance Creation
1.1 A First Encounter with AI
1.2 Intermedial-Dance
1.3 High-Tech Puppetry
1.4 Computer-Assisted Dance: A Review of its History
1.5 Human-AI Dance: Evolution and Interactivity
1.6 Machinic Movement Matrix
1.6.1 Categories of Human-machine dance
1.6.2 Limitations and potential adaptation
Chapter 2: Dance Creativity: Human vs AI
2.1 Creativity and Human Dance: Implications for Artificial Intelligence
2.1.1 Construction of the kinesthetic experience in dance
2.2 Artificial Choreography and Contingency in Virtual Space
2.3 Consciousness, intention and attention in the creation of dance
Chapter 3: Glytch and human decoding of dance
3.1 The emergence of dance phenomena
3.2 Subjectivity and sense in dance
3.3 AI dance
3.3.1 Approaches to AI dance creation and performance
3.3.2 Ritual, aura and the experience of a dancing AI
3.3.3 From Perception to Participation: Non-Human Danceability
3.4 The kinesthetic experience: The virtual and the real
Chapter 4: Design and observation of AI dance
4.1 Field research I: RITMO Centre (University of Oslo)
4.2 Theoretical approach and research methods
4.2.1 State of the art
4.2.2 Data collected
4.2.3 Arrival in the laboratory
4.3 Dance as a source of technological development
Chapter 5: Embodying the artificial
5.1 Embodied technology: towards an extended creativity
5.2 Learning from the artificial
5.3 Sonification of dance: An experience of technological embodiment
5.4 Enhacement of the sensory and expressive body
5.5 Transhumanist communication: Agency, consciousness and negotiation
Chapter 6: (Co) Creation of Dance with AI
6.1 The AI dancer
6.1.1 Contemporary approaches to the AI dancer
6.1.2 The AI dancer as creative agent and collaborator
6.2 Field Research II: Embodying AI workshop (University of the Arts London)
6.2.1 Human-AI creative collaboration experiment
6.3 Creative sensory ecosystem of dance: A human perspective
6.3.1 Ontological considerations for human-AI dance co-creation
6.3.2 Interactive flow in human-AI dance co-creation
Chapter 7: Posthuman dance: Dancing bodies of flesh, light and steel
7.1 Field research III: Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (University of Cambridge)
7.1.1 Designing an AI dancer
7.1.2 Getting to know the AI dancer: Collaboration, interactivity and control in human-AI kinesthetic creativity
7.1.3 Hybrid dance: A creation of human and artificial intelligence
7.2 Expansion of the kinesic signifier in the new humanities
7.2.1 Bodies of light: The virtual self through the object
7.2.2 Bodies of steel: Choreorobotics
7.2.3 Bodies of flesh: Technoculture in the human creation of movement
Chapter 8: Ethics, AI and dance
8.1 Fieldwork IV: Human-AI Dance in Public Performance
8.2 Limitations and Ethics on staging a digital AI dancer
8.3 The kinetic identity
Epilogue
References
Annexes