Amazon Dance
Video Performance
EthicAI=Labs, Goethe-Institute and DA Festival for Digital Arts Sofia are pleased to announce the online
premiere of "Amazon Dance" by director and visual artist Nico Angiuli.
The performance was produced by and staged at Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece in 2021 and resulted in a film documentation, which will be presented for the first time online in framework of EthicAI=Labs, a joint project by the Goethe-Institutes in Athens, Bucharest, Anakara, Sarajevo, Sofia and Zagreb, dealing with artificial intelligence and ethics. The one-time streaming will be followed by a live discussion with Nico Angiuli and choreographer Katerina El Raheb, streamed directly from Goethe-Institut Bulgaria, where the two artists present their work as part of the DA Festival.
Amazon dance is a video performance, part of a research work that aims to study algorithms used in factories such as Amazon, for finding the minimum time and the most efficient way to arrange and deliver items in large warehouses, which is a costly and time consuming process. Although many of these tasks are performed by humans, their routes are perfectly predetermined based on algorithms and their movements are specific to achieve the goals of each shift: picking the maximum number of products.
In the light of large corporations' ever-so-controversial labor policies the performance raises the question: is human labor or a robot more cost-effective? How does this translate to the performing body? Nico analyzed such algorithms in order to create a form of choreographic “score”. How can the abstract space of computing and unseen calculations be represented through bodily movement and effort?
Researcher in informatics and choreographer Katerina El Raheb, and a group of dancers, the team worked on this “translation” exploring how such an algorithm could be embodied and represented in space.
Director: Nico Angiuli
Choreographer: Katerina El Raheb
Goethe-Institute Bulgaria, 1 Budapesta str, Sofia
And livestreamed on Youtube.
More about the artists:
Nico Angiuli is a visual artist and film director; professor of Performing Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Italy, since 2006 has realized trans-border projects between Albania, Spain, and Greece. Angiuli, from a labor-related perspective, investigates many questions as with The Tools' Dance (video archive of agricultural gestures, 2009/2017); or as with The Human Tools (360° movie, 2019) in which from the meaning of the word robota -forced labor- in Czech language, relates ancient and modern forms of slavery to contemporary androids and geminoids. He has just been granted by the Italian Ministry of Culture to realize Part-Time Resistance, a performative archive on the private forms of sabotage and resistance in different contexts of oppression. Lives and works between Berlin and Bari.
Katerina El Raheb (dance artist/computer science researcher) was born in Alexandria Egypt and lives in Athens, Greece. She studied dance at the professional dance school Niki Kontaxaki, holds an Engineering diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, a master’s degree, and PhD from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is an academic researcher at NKUA since 2009 and “Athena” Research Center and is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Performing and Digital Arts, at the University of Peloponnese. Her research domain is Human Computer Interaction and the multidisciplinary domains that combine culture and artistic creation, computer science, performing arts and dance.
More about the organisers:
DA Fest is an international festival presenting new trends and important achievements in the fields of digital arts to the Bulgarian audience - digital video, interactive performance and installation, net art, sound art, robotics and generative systems, and other interdisciplinary forms. The event is organized by DA Lab Foundation in cooperation with the National Academy of Art in Sofia. DA Fest program includes exhibitions, performances, video art screenings, lectures and presentations, practical workshops that are held in an intensive program of 5 days. More than 300 artists, musicians and researchers from 30 countries around the world took part in the past seven festival editions since 2009.
EthicAI=LABS is a joint project by the Goethe-Institutes in Athens, Bucharest, Ankara, Sarajevo, Sofia and Zagreb. The project goal is to open a cross-genre space for critical conversation on AI and ethics in Southeast Europe. Central topics within the projects are linguistics, bias, creativity and media. The thematic framework of the project is a starting point to research and reflect on up-to-date issues with focus on the ethical side of AI in human life. The goal of the project is to set an open framework to discuss and present a wide variety of perspectives and aspects towards the AI systems in relation to humanity.
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The performance was produced as part of the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE)
program of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP), co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Details
Veranstaltungssaal, Goethe-Institut Bulgarien