Julia Wolf
I Can't Take My Eyes Off You
In this practice-led PhD, dance takes center stage as both a material lens and a form of thinking to examine the complex user-algorithm dynamics of social media 3.0. My thesis explores and reimagines connection and intimacy in the contemporary digital realm, focusing on TikTok’s hyper-individualized user interface and its prominent “For You” page. It investigates how dance can serve as a catalyst for re-assessing the relationship between humans and technology by exploring how TikTok’s algorithm choreographs real bodies across online and offline spaces at both micro and macro levels whilst considering its possible socio-political implications. Intimate interactions between user and algorithm are decoded through a practice that immerses itself within the app: by both engaging with “dance challenges” and using them to train neural networks.
Building upon a materially grounded, non-dialectic framework and drawing inspiration from artists such as Laurie Anderson, Ed Atkins, Merce Cunningham, Wayne McGregor, and Gruppe Laokoon, my work explores the potential of AI to create its own choreography based on the data it receives. In so doing, the thesis blurs the rigid lines between choreographer, dancer, audience, technology, and researcher. The project seeks to uncover how traditional conceptions such as private/public and intimate/estranged are becoming increasingly redundant and require urgent rethinking. Unique dances and bodies displayed on smartphones do not adhere to these binary predetermined patterns and territories. Instead, these digitalised entities continuously undergo re-scattering, re-distribution, re-assembly, and re-organization. This process highlights the fluidity and adaptability of digitally mediated interactions and the ever-changing nature of the digitally mediated “dancing self(ie).” Due to this, my thesis develops a “thinking rhythm” as a mode of being in the intimate – of the intimate – that challenges both the logic of closeness and what seems to be its opposite, distance.
This significant shift in post-pandemic dance studies challenges traditional notions of the god-like creator/choreographer and demands a reevaluation of the power dynamics that emerge in the encounter between human and algorithmic agents. The practice that led this research uses cutting-edge motion capture technology, machine learning, and hyper-realistic 3D animation to begin to address the complex relationship between humans and their (rhythmic) algorithmic choreography. Working with and against TikTok’s algorithm, the project begins to express its own aesthetic potential within the very encounter of its operation. This process exponentially multiplies the number of potential encounters, opening each to infinitely more calculations and re-calculations to propel a more detailed exploration – a making and simultaneously unmaking, a making-different – of the micro-choreographies and abstraction of movement. This infinitely impure dancing self(ie), characterised by a “noisy” multiplicity, uses rhythm (as a continuous overflowing expression of movement and thought) to uncover some of the unique potentials and pitfalls of human-machine interaction. This new dance stage has no concrete accomplishment, tangible substance, or specific form of expression. Instead, the possibility of technologically elevating calculus beyond its empirical condition emerges, suggesting a nomadic, pulsating choreographic cultural algebra.
