The dance prompts AI choreographer project is a long term community developed workshop series that will culminate in a performance, a film, a GIF archival of the performance minted to the blockchain, an article minted to the blockchain, an AI open source model and a curriculum for collaborating with AI.
The project centers itself around these core questions:
What is accessible movement?
How can we prompt the body for accessible movement?
What is inclusive movement?
How can we prompt the body for inclusive movement?
How can we use movement, improvisation & the morphic field for healing?
How can we disarm the institutionalized dance technique perspective that only trained people can dance?
How can we prompt the body to access movement freely?
How can we train AI ethically?
What are the ethics involved in training AI?
To answer these questions cari ann shim sham*, Karsen Tengan, Meenah Nehme & Demetris Charalambous will engage in a long term, multi-phase investigation with their bodies, their community & a neural network.
On October 14th 2023, phase one of the AI choreographer project, 'dance prompts', launched on EmProps as a participatory artificial intelligence generative dance mint.
https://emprops.ai/projects/dance-prompts?page=1&size=21
Some of these minted images were used in phase two, the dance prompts <dance jam>; with the first jam occurring at Columbia University in the Barnard Movement lab as part of the Artificial environments / environmental Intelligence Festival on February 23rd, 2024.
To design universal movement prompts to train the AI we employ the ‘dance prompts <dance jam>' experimental workshop score designed by cari ann, Karsen Tengan and Demetris Charalambous as our testing ground. We developed a score with three spaces for the workshop.
1. shoes off
An intermediary space for arrival, in the first chamber the participant is asked to take off their shoes. The body arrives and is made vulnerable through the release of the feet, liberating the participant and allowing them to connect and ground into the earth, floor, and space. A sign on the door asks them to take a deep breath before entering into the training room.
2. training room
The second space of arrival is for the mind, participants experience their first written prompt in the training room when they are asked 'what moves you?' followed by 'what gets in the way'. There are pieces of paper to write their responses on. The first question is placed into a metal bowl which is later brought into the playground. The second response is placed in the "trash".
3. playground
The final and deepest space of arrival is the playground, as participants enter, they are prompted at the entrance of the playground by a welcome mat which asks them to "activate and release"; the soul arrives. Geometric shapes spin on the floor, a generative art soundscape fills the room, watery light shines upon a dry erase board where a community exquisite corpse unfolds. Discoverables lurk in corners; crayons and paper, bells and signing bowls, pillows and blankets are all available for the participants during the jam.
Working with a score that utilizes improvisation and the morphic field, we create an experience for participants to become the AI through vocal improvisation, written prompts, visual prompts projected onto the floor, poetic sonic prompts that are mixed into a generative sound score, a community exquisite corpse, and written prompts created by our participants in the training room. This hour long improvisation moves bodies and souls into a state of shared ecstatic healing.
We follow the experience by a conversation with those who participate to discuss which prompts worked for their bodies and which did not and eliminate the prompts that may be biased, harmful, or not accessible. After the first jam, one participant remarked that the experience "changed their life", removing the shame they felt from the idea of moving their body. Another participant said they were liberated by the freedom allowed to move however they wanted in the space, without being told what to do. These responses from our community directly addressed some of our core questions, showing us early success in our process.
We then select a score of these visual and written prompts from the dance jam workshop to inform the next dance prompts <dance jam>, to further test and accumulate prompts on willing bodies. Each workshop output informs the next workshop input. We refine and develop the prompts to create the final prompt list for the training of the AI model when we feel we've generated enough prompts to train the machine, approximately 10,000.
In July of 2024 cari ann hosted a tech lab for 1 week at NYU in the Atlas Theater. Originally planned as a dance prompts residency, funding that was hoped for didn’t manifest so it was by invitation and some collaborators came through to experiment together with prompts and scores.
cari ann set up some visual prompts with overhead projection and a scanner line. Demetris set up a score for us to live inside of for some time, joey set up a generative sound environment and Meenah, joey, cari ann and Demi all participated in the score along with guest Hannah Frazen. We worked with mirrors, reflective surfaces, long LED light strip, LED candles, water projectors, a laser, chairs, dry erase boards and writing, front and overhead projections by Demi and cari ann*. We enjoyed the use of mirrors and reflection and are interested in incorporating this into future dance prompts workshops that are indoors.
From December 30, 2024, to January 1, 2025, the Peaceable Barn hosted a residency for dance prompts collaborators, Karsen, Meenah, cari ann* and Joey Zaza. The residency began on December 30, the group shared a hike around a lake and a dinner of duck and sweet potatoes. The first session took place in the studio in the barn that night after dinner, where Karsen, Meenah, and cari ann* explored prompts in a trio format, starting with writing and intentions, an exquisite corpse exercise, and then a score of building, and touch without knowing.
The next day the group engaged in an outdoor score, using prompts from the book "how to be feral", and danced through the woods, interacting with nature. We explored various forms of movement, including partnering with trees, mirroring, mimicry, handling leaves, engaging in moments of rest, reflection, and interactions with a stream. The outdoor score had a starting and ending location and the following prompts:
rest head onto nature
head down, w/o head on top
w/o standing up right
explore one motion
respond to nature field
no hands, w/o hands
move w/object, w/o hands
touching w/o hands
fin
optional - eat a chocolate
We moved for two hours after which we ate chocolates, drank beverages and had a chat about the score. We were all transformed by the experience and decided as a collective to continue seeking out ways to do dance prompts in nature.
On New Year's Eve, the group gathered for a light, sound, and projection-filled session that delved into various themes, including building and touch, and led to a beautiful point of contact movement exploration on the floor. The night concluded with a beautiful storm, a celebration in the kitchen and a magical experience in the woods. This residency was an exploration of the boundaries of movement and creativity while living together, sharing meals, and being in community. It was a space for experimentation, growth, and connection, and it left a lasting impact on all who participated. The group has decided to continue development for dance prompts for nature and will seek out door residencies to develop this area of prompting.
In March of 2025 we presented a dance prompts <performing the system> workshop at the Romancing the Machine Symposium at NYU. We rehearsed twice before, once in studio 1 and once in the Atlas Theater pictured below. We reviewed our archive of signs, objects, videos, sound, and text prompts, replacing some old videos with new ones. For the overhead projector, we swapped out the geometric shapes that opened Columbia for Cari Ann's Op Art Genuary prompt #19, "Red Star," while keeping the blue swirling circle. We introduced new body waves videos, transitioned into Demi's grid from Columbia, followed by a line used in the summer Tech lab with word prompts, and concluded with a spinning green Genuary prompt for flocking into Karsen's apostesis for cuddle puddle, finishing with a new slow scanner line.
We added a front projection element, starting with Meenah's swirls, followed by body waves and word prompts. During the Grid section, we used a Mary Oliver poem. Cari Ann created generative sound sketches for a base sound, while Joey Zaza's #6 played during body waves and grid sections, with warning sirens during the flocking and cuddle puddle sections. We included the pinky small inflatable anemone to enter with a listening element (headphones with music), a mirror paired with the Glitch Feminism book by Legacy Russell, a drawing center with crayons and paper, a bell center with a singing bowl, orange fabric with a candle at the center of the red star, ropes, and two large reflective frames.
The entrance featured the prompts, "What moves you? What gets in the way?" with a welcome mat. We began with Exquisite Corpse; not everyone engaged with the drawing, but those who did contributed while others explored the space. We gathered in a circle for toning, outlined by ropes, held hands, and vocalized before picking up the fabric with the candle in the center. Eventually, Demi and Cari Ann disrupted this to move into a rope improvisation section, where written prompts sparked responses, and bells rang. Meenah introduced a chair and a reflective panel, which was used to create an altar. Some participants entered pinky, including Patricia B.
The rope section became lively, and the grid inspired playful movement, though not everyone fully adapted to flocking. Our audience, initially over 30, thinned to around 15 by the end. Participants on the floor colored the apostesis projection, while others formed a circle above them with the fabric. We concluded with Exquisite Corpse and shared reflections. Jack noted the inclusivity of the experience, while another shared they felt safe. One participant realized their lack of doodling skills didn’t matter, and another found the experience refreshing and childlike. While some prompts were object-oriented, one person shared that they danced with the prompt "screen addiction" .
Overall, people enjoyed the experience, finding the sound and visuals effective, and appreciated the text prompts. Pinky was well-received, with Patricia describing it as a "womb bath." Setup and breakdown were relatively easy in the compact, soft black space with black curtains.
Our neural network AI Choreographer will be trained on this community developed data from the dance prompts <dance jam> (s) to give an output of a still image and written text directions for a dance with bias towards inclusive and accessible movement. For the performative side of the project, <dancing with the machine>, we will ask the AI to give us instructions for a dance. This output will be translated by our three different bodies and performed as duets next to a projection of a p5.js visualization of the machine and its sonified voice. The machine's dance will consist of a point cloud attached to a skeleton that dances the output and is projected onto a wall next to each dancer with accompanying AI vocalization reading of the written prompt layered with ambient generative music created with p5.js sound. Interactivity between the sketch and our bodies will create a disruption of the shape of the cloud, our duet partner, making it become sharper, bigger or change in color, so that there is some sort of variation and connection between the two dancers, machine and human. We are interested in exploring how each body does a different dance pitted against the generative expression of the dance movement by the machine visualized through the sketch.
These duets will be performed for our community as a durational installation, filmed and photographed to create a film and GIFs that are minted to the Tezos blockchain to archive the work and gifted as tokens to our dance prompts <dance jam> participants as an effort to onboard new people to the blockchain. The community will also be invited to dance with the machine and have their own duets filmed, photographed and minted as GIFs if they so choose to expand the archive.
We will follow this performance with an artist chat with our community to dialogue on our process and allow participants' to share their experiences in an interactive conversation around ideas of bias in AI and the systems of patriarchy and white body biases embedded in dance. We will then introduce the concept of using of improvisation and the morphic field to move bodies and souls into shared states of healing. This dialogue further informs our process we are employing to undo inherent harmful practices and expectations of contemporary dance through the dance prompts AI choreographer and to imagine new forms of dance and movement healing practices.
Why?
Now, as an artist and educator working at the intersection of dance and technology, it is my current desire to liberate dance while hacking gender and racial biases in AI. As a female leader in a male dominated field it is important to push back, question and reimagine ways of dance and dancing for the future generations while interrogating the ethics of training AI models.
In 2021, joey zaza, IV (Ivan Pravdin), and I created an AI curator for the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, an online digital art museum that zaza & I co-founded in 2020. We trained a neural network on content, with consent, of 50,000 images from MoMA, and additional content from Art Institute of Chicago, Behance, and the data set from the 2021 mowna Biennial, an exhibit of an international pool of artists selected from 44 countries gathered through a free call for submissions process that ran from January through March of 2021. We trained the neural network to organize, sort and rank still images of art with a bias towards equity, diversity, and inclusion. Once trained, we employed the AI Curator for the 2021 exhibition of “This Show is Curated by a Machine 🤖” on mowna.org. We co-curated with the machine, allowing the machine, and humans to curate side by side. We, the AI and the humans, had a crossover of selecting the same 10 artists, which we felt was a success. We also found artists that we were on the fence about selecting and ended up not choosing, were chosen by the machine, further signaling a positive outcome.
This experience allowed me to think about AI in new ways and inspired me to continue this exploration with machine learning. The initial idea was to train an AI on my movement to choreograph a solo for my body. This concept developed further into the desire to develop an AI choreographer that confronts body and dance biases inherent in AI.
To begin my creative research, I spent 2023 asking ChatGPT and Bard various questions about dance, directions on how to dance, choreography and choreographers. This work revealed inherent biases found in AI towards the medium and a surprising lack of information.
Originally the plan was to develop written prompts based on this research. Then in late 2023, Emergent Properties, a generative AI platform on the tezos and ethereum blockchains, launched their member token, which by purchasing, offered me the opportunity to work with their Stable Diffusion model to develop visual AI generated prompts for dance. This made sense to my dancer's mind, as we often work with visual and text based prompts.
The Emprops dance prompts project's final output utilizes stick figures, a common shorthand for dancers, and choreographers. It took many days for me to arrive at this visual mechanism. After numerous failed attempts with prompts that the machine did not understand and playing with AI interpretations of self portrait images of my dancing body that were overly feminine, it became clear that the project needed a more minimal visual device, one that is universally recognizable and that is used often in dance class, choreography & pedagogy.
By using a looping approach, running the minimal text prompt and saving successful images, I fed the project 31 prompt created seed images pairing them with variables to create a large supply of consistently varied outputs, with no two being the same. I knew the motion dynamics in the image were successful when the outputs made me want to move my body.
I enjoyed interrogating the many sliders that EmProps offers. Using the CFG scale, I developed a stylistic super low-fi look that reminds me of the digital art and print art of the 80s, an era that influenced me deeply as a young dancer and artist.
my settings:
model SD v2.1
sampling method LMS
sampling steps 32
CFG scale 21.3
width height 512
Upscaler 1 Lanczos
Upscaler 2 Nearest
Upscaler 2 visibility 1
GFPGAN visibility 1
Codeformer visibility 1
Codeformer weight 1
prompt
using only black and white make an image of {{value}}stick figures dancing {{direction}} with a {{color}}{{background}}
variables:
value - numerous, two, three, four
direction - in a circle, jumping, skipping, leaping, bowing, laying down, looking up, reaching up, spinning in place, kicking, yoga poses, squatting, bending over, kneeling, karate poses, tai chi poses, ice skating poses, modeling poses, running, stretching poses, playing sports, boxing, walking, in a giant circle, doing a circle dance
color - black and white, black and white
background - white, black
Some of the outputs were used to create sequences for duets and trios, that were minted to objkt and used in developmental phase for dance prompts <dance jam>. Both are included in this article and can be found at this link. https://objkt.com/collections/KT1WDjpfTMBi4Qk6CjYGCAa6MwfMXNma5uV6
It must be said that the Stable Diffusion AI model is not ethically, morally or copyright sound. It has come to light that some of the art used to train their model, and many other models, was done without consent. This has caused a huge divide in the art world. With or against. It is my opinion having developed and trained a model for mowna.org that we must acknowledge that there are biases and faults in the development of most AI and work against that. Sitting out in protest and not doing anything to help change the situation is not an option for me. AI is a powerful tool that we will continue to see develop. We need to involve ourselves in the training of new and better models with bias towards equity, gender, diversity, accessibility and inclusion.
The dance prompts AI choreographer will be made available through github as an open source resource for people wanting to learn dance, dancers wanting to receive prompts for movement generation, and teachers looking for liberated ways of teaching dance and everyone else interested. Following that an open source curriculum, dance prompts <collaborating with AI>, will be developed for pedagogy. An article will be written and minted to the Tezos blockchain via fx(hash) detailing the process of creation and an open source curriculum will be developed from this experience and shared online.
Our timeline is as follows:
step 1 generate visual and text movement prompts to train the AI model through dance prompt <dance jam> workshops and host community talks
Step 2 transfer the movement into data to train the model
Step 3 train the model with data
Step 4 develop a visualization of the machine dancing with processing & p5.js sound
Step 5 rehearse dance prompts <dancing with machine>, dancer & machine visualization
Step 6 perform and capture dance prompts <dances with machine> for the community
Step 7 archive performance on the blockchain via GIFs and article as gifts to the community
Step 8 develop open source curriculum - dance prompts <collaborating with AI> and share with community
The performed duets dance prompts <dancing with machine> between our bodies and the machine present a beautiful pairing of technology and humanity that allows an example of an optimistic future with AI by reimagining dance through a liberated lens. The photos and videos of these performances capturing these moments archive the beauty of the human and the machine in shared movement and place this onto the blockchain for all to enjoy, promoting human well-being through the access of and viewing of the content. Watching a body move triggers the watcher’s mirror neurons and is a healing and uplifting experience.
The dance prompts AI choreographer once complete and fully functioning will be open source and available on Github for any body to use. This creates agency for all who utilize the neural network in their studies, creative research, pedagogy, or play by providing movement that is inclusive and accessible, making available an optimistically biased AI.
An inquiry-based practice means working with the unknown, confronting mystery, asking questions and not knowing the answers. It is a place that I personally work from often. In the studio, my collaborators and I often come up with questions for movement that we improvise on for long periods of time as our creative research. A prompt can be "How can we move in a way that liberates our bodies through dance? " We answer this through improvisation, moving our bodies together through space, using the morphic field to guide us. We engage with our core questions in this way.
To explain the morphic field let’s begin with what Goethe wrote; “All that lives builds an atmosphere around it” in 1823 in his Natural Science Booklets.
Morphic fields, theoretically introduced by British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, are invisible energetic fields that encompass all living organisms and phenomena in nature. They are considered carriers of information and memories that are passed down from generation to generation.
I am certified in Family & Systemic Constellation by Luisa Muhr, Peter Orban’s protégé who is Bert Hellinger's protégé. Hellinger who lived in South Africa for twenty years with the Zulu, was exposed to their Constellation rituals and reshaped the work, bringing it to Germany, to help heal Hollocuast trauma. Muhr writes “It is a medium which can wander back and forth between living organisms (sometimes thousands of miles apart) and spread information. Generally speaking: Energies and/or information travel in mysterious ways and share themselves.“ Luisa states, “to be in the field, one must enter a state of self forgetfulness…”
Sheldrake ruminates on the subject in his book “Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home”, 2000, p. 24 “Morphic fields hold together and coordinate the parts of a system in space and time, and contain a memory from previous similar systems. Human social groups such as tribes and families inherit through their morphic fields a kind of collective memory. The habits, beliefs, and customs of the ancestors influence the behavior of the present, both consciously and unconsciously. We all tune in to collective memories, similar to the collective unconscious proposed by the psychologist Carl Jung.”
The morphic field is also referred to as “the knowing field” acting as a force field created through a group of people that are somehow gathered within and across space. This field has its own purpose and serves as a guide towards resolutions.
As an artist working at the intersection of dance and technology, I’ve been using the morphic field before knowing what it was. It’s revealed itself slowly over time, in my obsession with circles and circling, creating emotional states, and improvisation strategies that use experimental scores, and in my personal practice of paganism as a healing hedge witch. In my current work I use the morphic field with physical improvisation to move humans into shared ecstatic states of healing. My 2019 work, "warning sirens", used the morphic field as a channel for investigating internal states, gesture, not seeing & seeing, the ideas of beckoning, warning, conjuring, and warrior dances to ask the questions: what are you at war with? what are you fighting for? when will you open your eyes? will you be ready when the sirens call?
In 2022, my work "gorgeous creatures" used the morphic field to create sacred space through a task based experimental score. And the dance prompts <dance jam> uses improvisation and the morphic field to move participants into a collective state of ecstatic healing for the body and the soul.
My research process working with the morphic field is to read, write, practice, be in the field, reflect and rest. I am in the field in Constellations every month, and set up movement constellations with my collaborators for rehearsals. I devour readings from my certification training returning to read again and take readings that resonate into rehearsal to read with my collaborators and then move through them. A reading by Malidoma Patrice Some titled Ritual was used in the process of developing the experimental score for dance prompts <dance jam>; first iteration performed on Feb 23rd, 2024.
During this dance prompts <dance jam> workshop, I felt the field working through me in a moment when I felt a knowing to take a woman’s hand and lead her to the corner where a giant post it note pad and some crayons were. I gestured to the objects and she sat down and began to create. At the end of the jam her work was revealed in the circle we formed, it was an exquisite sketch by a clearly talented artist. I did not know anything about her, and knew that the field chose her through me.
Now is the time to reimagine dance through developing technologies of AI. By imagining a choreographer trained on data that is biased towards inclusive and accessible movement, the project works to liberate dance so that all bodies can enjoy and move in their own ways from universal visual and text based prompts. This process nurtures human well-being and gives agency through body movement and positive interaction with AI.
The images from dance prompts can be used to make dance, to move bodies, and to move hearts and minds. Hopefully looking at these images will stimulate your mirror neurons and give you a visceral feeling of motion and inspire you to move.
Enjoy!
*This article is a way of marketing, promoting and spreading the word about the mint and the project. As twitter and meta are now ethically immoral to engage with, I am investigating ways to use the blockchain in lieu of social media. Thank you in advance for your time spent reading it, and appreciate your support in spreading it on the blockchain by buying it.
More information is available on cariannshimsham.com
Thank you for your participation and support.
xo,
cari ann shim sham*