Introduction | Active Research

The projects featured in this section are currently being incubated at metaLAB (at) Harvard, an idea foundry, knowledge design lab, and production studio experimenting in the networked arts and humanities, where I am a principal. My work on choreographic interfaces and data embodiment demonstrates how I dialectically research dance and computation. In terms of directionality, my research on choreographic interfaces moves from dance to computation, and that on data embodiment, from computation to dance. In the former, I seek to increase the somatic interactivity between people and computational systems by integrating choreography models into the programming of human-computer interfaces. And in the latter, I seek to make scientific information more communicative in the public domain by translating datasets into movement scores for performance. In my writing, I investigate how performance can be used as a schematic for critiquing interactive technologies, where bodies perform and machines interpret their meanings, often with racial bias or toward surveillance. What motivates my research is a conviction that embodiment in digital settings matter, with the awareness that the extent to which it does depends on how bodies are mediated and understood − culturally, computationally, and politically. My dialectic approach underscores that choreography can make computational systems and abstract information more kinesthetic, all the while critiquing the bodily politics of tech. It also signals how my work dances between HCI, data communication, and performance studies.

*Banner image from work Portrait of M. Greenberg