Operator: On Generative Choreography

Hosted by the Coding Lab of the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Join Operator’s Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti for an in depth and process-focused lecture about their recent work in on-chain generative choreography, contextualized within their history of integrating advanced technologies in their medium non-allegiant experiential practice.

Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti are an award-winning experiential artist duo who founded their collaborative art practice, known as Operator, in 2016. Referred to as ‘the two critical contemporary voices on digital art’s international stages’ (Clot Magazine) and ‘LGBT power couple’ (Flaunt), their expertises collide in large scale conceptual works recognizable for their poetic approach to technology. Ti’s background as an immersive artist and Human Computer Interaction technologist, and Catherine’s as a choreographer, performance artist and gender scholar make for a uniquely medium non-allegiant output, bringing together environments, technology and the body. In fall 2021 the duo began a translation of themes from their Lumen Prize-winning work ‘I’d rather be in a dark silence’ into the Privacy Collection, exploring the tension between privacy and transparency in blockchain technology.

Join Operator’s Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti for an in depth and process-focused lecture about their recent work in on-chain generative choreography, contextualized within their history of integrating advanced technologies in their experiential practice. The duo trace the roots of their generative choreography process to Merce Cunningham’s ‘chance dance’ method, the history of computational choreography, the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) Movement of the 1960s, as well as embodied approaches to human machine collaboration as pioneered by early women in digital art. The work starts and ends with the human body; their custom generative model creates choreographic sequences from a movement library made by the artists, then each unique sequence drives compositional elements that determine the final visual output. This series and experiment in embodied generative art is planned to release on Art Blocks in Spring 2023, and culminates in a live performance of all sequences generated by the model. The experience of the work from minting to the performance is designed to be a slow recovery of the human.

Operator has been awarded a Lumen Prize (Immersive Environments), ADC Award (Gold Cube), S+T+ARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), and MediaFutures (a European Commission funded programme). They’ve been speakers at Christie’s Art+Tech Summit, Art Basel, ZKM, MIT Open Doc Lab, BBC Click, Bloomberg ART+TECHNOLOGY, Ars Electronica, Contemporary Istanbul, and CADAF.