Living Archive:
An AI Performance Experiment
韋恩 • 麥奎格 | Wayne MCGREGOR
Living Archive / Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment
2018 / 2019
Interactive installation / Dance
Dimensions variable
Collaboration between Google Arts & Culture Lab and Studio Wayne McGregor
“I wanted to make use of my archive of work in an interesting way. The Living Archive is a massive atlas that allows you to zone in on any one physical movement, or to move through movements across bodies, to make the representation of a body do something that’s never been done before. It’s a brilliant way of organizing physical intelligence that you can then use to develop new physical ideas. It gives you all these possibilities that you couldn’t have imagined”
– Wayne McGregor
In collaboration with Google’s Arts and Culture Lab, Studio Wayne McGregor developed the Living Archive — an artificially intelligent choreographic tool, trained on hundreds of hours of video from choreographer Wayne McGregor's extensive back catalogue, as well as solo material created on each of the current company.
From what it learned about the individual physical styles of an array of bodies dancing McGregor’s choreography, the system was able to respond to any new movement phrase by suggesting multiple original possibilities for the next phrase. Through swift real-time dialogue between wo/man and machine, the Living Archive unleashed the creative movement potential stored at molecular level within former works, amplifying the spectrum of possibility for choreographic decision-making and bringing dancers of the present into contact with traces of their predecessors.
A variation on the Creation theme that inspires Thomas Adès’ “In Seven Days”, the unique movement vocabulary and visual language for “Living Archive: An AI Performance Experiment” was generated solely with this strange and elemental new body. Ben Cullen Williams’ design for the work manipulates abstract visualizations of the AI generated choreography into a suspended video installation which explores ideas of dance as code and vice versa.
Artist description
Wayne McGregor CBE is a multi-award-winning British choreographer and director. He is Artistic Director of Studio Wayne McGregor, encompassing creative collaborations in dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science; a touring company of dancers Company Wayne McGregor; and learning and research programmes. Wayne McGregor is also Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet and from 2021 to 2024, Director of the Dance Department for the Venice Biennale, and is regularly commissioned by and has works in the repertories of the most important ballet companies around the world. McGregor is Professor of Choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, has Honorary Doctorates from University of Plymouth, University of Chester, University of Leeds and University of the Arts London, and is an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association. He has won four Critics' Circle National Dance Awards, two Time Out Awards, two South Bank Show Awards, three Olivier Awards, a prix Benois de la Danse and two Golden Mask Awards. In 2011 McGregor was awarded a CBE for Services to Dance.