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THEATER AND PERFORMANCE
SPEAKER: Sydney Skybetter, Brown University
Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion - human or otherwise - move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, “Dances with Robots.” In this presentation, Skybetter will cover topics ranging from Boston Dynamics robots, Tesla’s “Party Mode” and Optimus robots, parasitic aesthetic theory, the movie M3GAN, Artificial Intelligence, and a little bit of Beyoncé .
About the Speaker
Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB (at) Harvard University, a contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Deputy Dean of the College for Curriculum and Co-Curriculum, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure. www.skybetter.org
Click here to access a livestream of the event on April 18.
Co-sponsored by metaLAB (at) Harvard