Gibson & Martelli: nino

In the organizer's words:

Shadows play
on weathered textures,
landscapes both natural and surreal.
Light dances
on surfaces,
virtual and visceral.
Avatars breathe,
embodying the earth,
the sky,
and the storm within,
drifting between worlds-
animated by the unseen currents
of a dancer's breath,
captured in the pulse
of motion.

In James Lovelock's Novacene, humans and AI systems coexist - both purposeful and intelligent. Although their relationship could be friendly or hostile, the current state of the planet demands cooperation. The future will be shaped by the need to preserve Gaia, the Earth, and not by the selfish needs of humans or other intelligent species.
nino invites you into a game world that is controlled by individual visitors: AI is used here as a creative muse to generate figures from input. Similarly, the dance practice Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) uses spoken text as input to encourage creative movement and play. Gibson & Martelli use scripts and short texts as inputs to generate avatar designs. They then model and animate these in 3D. The SRT process influences movement improvisation to draw viewers into the energy and qualities of movement.
The human experience is shaped by boundaries of identity - gender, race, age and culture. Non-human avatars, animated by dancers using motion capture, dissolve boundaries and offer a space in which identity becomes fluid, mutable and infinite. These avatars challenge the boundaries of what it means to "be" and "experience", enabling fluidity and existences that occupy spaces beyond the body.

The performance developed at Trafó in Budapest will be transformed for TEMPS D'IMAGES into a game world controlled by individual visitors.

Creative technologist Bruno Martelli and dance artist Ruth Gibson create site-specific, large-scale works for parks, hospitals, museums, galleries and theaters. Using machine learning, simulation and motion capture, the artists design immersive virtual realities. Themes of disruption, disguise, camouflage, surveillance and identity recur. Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli have a joint PhD in Media and Communication from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The duo have been nominated for a British Academy of Film & Television Arts Award (BAFTA), received numerous awards and were named the first artists-in-residence at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and artists-in-residence at #studios44Mocaplab in Geneva. They were represented at the 66th BFI London Film Festival and the 79th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia.

In English language.

Access is possible throughout without reservation.

As part of MODINA, the symposium Dancing in the Digital Age: Bodies, Codes, and Affective Futures will take place on January 24 with keynote speeches, panel discussions and a lecture performance.