This paper is an autoethnography describing my process of choreographing a dance performance called Vintage, in which my collaborators and I explored the idea of reusing dances we shared. To support our learning of the dances, I used a web application that allowed me to record them as annotated audiovisual clips.

Musicians are using neural audio models to synthesize new sounds, but the sound space accessible through such models is often constrained to essentially interpolated approximations of existing training data, limiting the true sonic novelty musicians can elicit from generative models. To address this problem, we present Latent Novelification (LN), a machine learning method which learns to transform vectors in any generative model’s latent space into new, contrasting vectors according to an objective function which we define. The LN objective enforces that these contrasting vectors explicitly diverge from existing training data while remaining semantically meaningful to the generative model, facilitating generative novelty beyond simple interpolation. LN supports divergent creativity by helping musicians generate new and novel sounds, integrating into any neural audio model interface to controllably and interactively expand accessible sound space. This work contributes a new algorithmic method—implemented in open-source software—which musicians working with neural audio synthesis can use to synthesize new sounds to incorporate into their art.

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have enabled powerful generative models, yet few are tailored to dancers’ practices. We present a long-term collaboration with a Voguing and Dancehall collective to design movement generation models trained on their repertoire. Our initial study with the dancers revealed that, despite limited physical realism, the generated movements inspired them. Iterative development led to Korai, an interactive tool for monitoring training, visualizing motion data, and prompting generation, which improved output quality. A subsequent structured observation study compared three model variants with high, medium, and low fidelity to the original dataset’s style. Results show that dancers favored either highly faithful or highly unfaithful outputs, rejecting medium fidelity as neither authentic to their style nor creatively stimulating. Our findings highlight how direct collaboration with dancers not only informs model design but also deepens understanding of AI’s role in supporting creative movement practices.

Hip-hop dance battles are events where dancers improvise to an unfamiliar DJ’s mix. The dancers’ technicality in responding to the music, along with the collective dimensions of these encounters, represents a largely unexplored area of investigation in HCI. Using an autobiographical design approach grounded in the hip-hop practice of the first author, we developed five interaction scenarios on a hip-hop–specific movement vocabulary. Our interactive sonification enables both individual and collective improvisation through synchronized motion sensing and interactive sound loops. This approach allowed us to design three interconnected workshops to investigate how dancers use sonification in improvisation. Our findings show that sonification was perceived either as a validation of movement or as a medium for open-ended exploration. We contribute with: (1) the formalization of a movement vocabulary and the design of interactive scenarios for hip-hop movement sonification, (2) insights into how dancers experience sonification through exploration and improvisation, and (3) guidelines for the design of movement sonification in hip-hop contexts.

In the mid-2010s, media artists began developing practices using machine learning (ML) as an artistic medium. Since 2022, the rise of large generative models, the mainstreaming of AI as consumer products, and intensifying ethical disputes have reconfigured the conditions of their artistic practice. This paper aims to understand how artists working with ML over the past decade respond to these shifts, shedding light on how practices, tools, and culture co-evolve. We address this question through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 artists active before 2020. Our findings show how artists experience narrowing aesthetics and reduced malleability of post-2020 ML systems, have diverging views on where to locate moral responsibility with large AI models, and face shifting cultural reception that challenges the legibility of their work. We map how artists envision their practice going forward and discuss those orientations with respect to HCI conversations on design and creativity.

This paper describes a workshop conducted as part of practice-based research that aims at critiquing online tracking algorithms commonly found in everyday web environments. The workshop introduced participants to online tracking algorithms using a series of choreographic exercises that informed a discussion on the topic and strategies to counteract data-driven extractivist technologies. We analysed the outcomes of our workshop and showed that it allowed individuals to become more aware of their lack of agency over data harvesting and its use by digital services, and enabled them to develop strategies for reclaiming agency over their personal data. We discuss how the choreographic approach used in the workshop contributes to engaging people in a critical examination of online tracking in their everyday lives and to inspire forms of countering extractive algorithmic systems. Our paper contributes empirical insights on how choreography can be used to raise awareness of data tracking online.

Systems to interactively generate audio from human movement are used by artists including dancers to support their performances and practice. However, current real-time movement-to-sound systems require specialized hardware or expertise, or map only very simple movement-to-audio relationships. We present a new technique and system implementation for interactive sonification of human movement through unsupervised machine learning. Our system maps between latent spaces, linking a pose estimator to a neural audio generator to enable sonification of human bodies. This may lower barriers to entry for artists to generate sound from their embodied movement through complex mappings. Our system requires no specialized hardware or niche AI expertise, minimal data to learn a user's custom movements, and trains extremely fast. It represents a new method for mapping custom data to a latent space through unsupervised learning, and advances state-of-the-art interactive movement sonification through its increased accessibility and ease of use relative to its complexity.

Human-Computer Counter-Choreographies is an artistic research project that combines critical design, choreography and embodied sense-making with data tracking. The project has evolved into various formats such as workshops, a live-coding performance piece, web-based tools and artworks. In this talk, Joana Chicau will introduce the motivations behind the project and how it has impacted audiences by raising awareness of data tracking. She will also demo a custom version of the open-source DuckDuckGo privacy extension which unveils online tracking algorithms through audio and visual feedback.

Generative AI is increasingly used to create images from text, but its role in documentary photography remains under-explored. This paper investigates how generative AI can be integrated into documentary practice while maintaining ethical standards. Through interviews with six documentary photographers, we explored their views on AI’s potential to support community-driven storytelling. While AI presents opportunities for creative expression and community involvement, concerns about trust, authenticity, and decontextualization of images persist. Photographers expressed doubts about AI’s ability to accurately representlivedexperiences,fearingitcould compromise narrative integrity. Our findings suggest that AI tools should be designed to enhance collaboration and transparency in storytelling, complementing rather than replacing traditional documentary methods. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on AI in photography, advocating for the development of tools that preserve the ethical foundations of documentary storytelling while empowering communities.

We present a retrospective autoethnography grounded in data-driven design. The first author collected her movement data and subjective experience of learning the dance repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, which together were encoded into the design of a set of plaster artefacts physicalising her embodied dance learning progression. The artefacts reflect the first author’s bodily transformation, mirroring her transition from discomfort to ease, and changes in her expressive capabilities. Our method offers an alternative to documentation of embodied learning through design. Throughout our design process we leverage on the movement data, the field notes and the first author’s memory of her journey, all of which constitute entangled and complementary input into her experience of dance learning. We show that the data physicalisations provided a gateway into the intangible experience and allowed for a deep and reflexive understanding of our dataset.

This paper presents an autoethnography of 3 years of learning to play the theremin, an instrument lacking tangible feedback. While the theremin is typically invoked in HCI to emphasize the importance of the tactile modality, we interrogate how I, the player, attained musical proficiency without touch.

This paper examines prevailing understandings of creativity in creative computing research through the lens of feminist epistemology. We analyze “creativity support” as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work. Drawing on existing literature and practices, the paper surfaces four views about creative work that underpin current creative technologies and HCI research: problem-solving, cognitive emergence, embodied action, and tool-mediated expert activity. Each view makes different claims about the role of computing in creative work and the creative subject assumed. We articulate the attendant politics of each view and illustrate how critical feminist epistemology can serve as an analytical tool to reason about the trade-offs of various creativity definitions. The paper concludes with recommendations for integrating feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research.

Designing technology for dance presents a unique challenge to conventional design research and methods. It is subject to diverse and idiosyncratic approaches to the artistic practice that it is situated. We investigated this by joining a dance company to develop interactive technologies for a new performance. From our firsthand account, we show the design space to be messy and non-linear, demanding flexibility and negotiation between multiple stakeholders and constraints. Through interviews with performers and choreographers, we identified nine themes for incorporating technology into dance, revealing tensions and anxiety, but also evolution and improvised processes to weave complex layers into a finished work. We find design for dance productions to be resistant to formal interpretation, requiring designers to embrace the intertwining stages, steps, and methods of the artistic processes that generate them. We suggest that our findings can be of value in other HCI contexts requiring flexible design approaches.

In this pictorial, we followed a Research through Design (RtD) inquiry where we explored the concept of loops as a design material. Using an Ethnographic design methodology, we aimed to create artifacts that represent the ways in which content can be repeated, distorted and modified in loops. Our process consisted firstly of the practice of noticing loops in everyday life. This led us to curate a portfolio of loops’ occurrences in objects and living organisms from our surroundings. Secondly, we organized the loops that we noticed in a typology and created a score that instantiates such a variety of loops. Finally, we followed the score to produce 1. knitting work, 2. woodwork, 3. lino printing, and 4. dance performances as art-based physicalizations of different instances of loops. Our study of loops uncovers a designerly way to reflect on a daily phenomenon (loops) through making physical artifacts and dancing.

We present how we co-designed with a connoisseur a system that visualizes a star-like ribbon joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data to perform Isadora Duncan’s dances. Additionally, the system visualizes the trace of the solar plexus and specific keyframes of the choreography as key poses placed in the 3D space. We display the visualization in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan’s qualities and choreographic style. Through a workshop with dancers, we ran a structured observation where we compared qualitatively how the dancers were able to perceive Duncan’s qualities and embody them using the system set according to two different conditions: displaying all the future keyframes or displaying a limited number of keyframes. We discuss the results of our workshop and the use of augmented reality in the studio for pedagogical purposes.

We present a soma design process of a digital musical instrument grounded in the designer’s first-person perspective of practicing Dalcroze eurhythmics, a pedagogical approach to learning music through movement. Our goal is to design an instrument that invites musicians to experience music as movement. The designer engaged in the soma design process, by first sensitising her body through Dalcroze training. Subsequently, she articulated her bodily experiences into experiential design qualities that guided the making of the instrument. The process resulted in the design of a large suspended mobile played by touching it with bare skin. We shared our instrument with 7 professional musicians and observed how it inspires a variety of approaches to musical meaning-making, ranging from exploring sound, to choreographing the body. Finally, we discuss how engaging with Dalcroze eurhythmics can be generative to the design of music–movement interaction.

We present a long-term collaboration between dancers and designers, centred around the transmission of the century-old repertoire of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We engaged in a co-design process with a Duncanian dancer consisting of conversations and participation in her transmission of Duncan’s choreographies and technique. We then articulated experiential qualities central to Duncan’s repertoire and used them to guide the design of the probes, the sounding scarfs. Our probes sonify dancers’ movements using temporal sensors embedded in the fabric of the scarfs, with the goal of evoking Duncan’s work and legacy. We shared the probes with our Duncan dance community and found that they deepen the dancers’ engagement with the repertoire. Finally, we discuss how co-designing with slowness and humility were key to the dialogue created between the practitioners, allowing for seamless integration of design research and dance practice.

In this pictorial, we describe an auto-biographical design process that led to the fabrication of a soft robotic wearable for lower limb movement guidance that we designated Wearable Choreographer. We first explored the design from a first-person perspective and then shared it with four dancers. Our experiments illustrate how the wearable both constrains and inspires the dancers towards new ways of performing, challenging them to rethink their movements. Our design inquiry contributes with reflections on soft robotics that uncover the challenges and prospects designers and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction face when designing, prototyping and experimenting with such technologies for embodied interactions.

We present a new abstract representation of choreographic motion that conveys the movement quality of fluidity that is central to the style of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan. We designed our model through a collaboration with an expert Duncanian dancer, using five flexible ribbons joining at the solar plexus and animated it from motion capture data using a tailored optimization-based algorithm. We display our model in a Hololens headset and provide features that allow to visualize and manipulate it in order to understand and learn Duncan’s choreographic style. Through a series of workshops, we explored our system with professional dancers and were able to observe how it provides them with an immersive experience of a novel visualization of Duncan movement qualities in a way that was not possible with traditional human-like or skeleton-based representations.

We present a performance-led inquiry that involved a live coder programming movement-based interactive sound and two dance improvisers. During two years of collaboration, we developed a joint improvisation practice where the interactions between the dancers’ movement and the sound feedback are programmed on the fly through live coding and movement sensing. To that end, we designed a new live coding environment called CO/DA that facilitates the real-time manipulation of continuous streams of the dancers’ motion data for interactive sound synthesis. Through an autoethnographic inquiry, we describe our practice of sound and movement improvisation where live coding dynamically changes how the dancers’ movements generate sound, which in turn influences the dancers’ improvisation. We then discuss the value, potential and challenges of our dance/code improvisation practice, along with its implications as a design method.

Alongside recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), a new art practice has emerged in recent years that borrows and transforms these advances in the production of artworks. The actors of this emergent practice are coming from contemporary art, media and digital arts. These artists have developed an original practice of AI within their creative field. In this article, we propose a qualitative study to explore the nature of this practice. We interviewed five internationally renowned artists about how AI is integrated into their work. Through a thematic analysis of the interviews, we first find that their practice relies on crafting algorithms and data as materials. We uncover how they explicitly use this material unpredictability rather than avoid it. Secondly, we highlight the politics of their practice that consist of resisting the culture of AI research, as well as its inherent power dynamics. We also highlight how their relationship with the technology is imbued with ethics and how they rethink their role with respect to the technology. In this paper, we aim to provide the CSCW community with a way to expand the framework in which AI can be understood not only as a tool but also as cultural and political design material.

Dance making is often a highly idiosyncratic, collaborative endeavour between a choreographer and a group of dancers that constitutes a rich context for designers of creativity-support tools (CSTs). However, long-term, ecologically valid studies of collaboration in dance making are rare, especially when mediated by digital tools. We present a 5-month field study in the frame of a dance course, where a choreographer and six students used a CST originally designed for choreographic writing. We contrast our findings with our initial assumptions about the role of the tool to mediate a diversity of notating styles and hierarchical roles. We highlight the value of and the challenges behind this in-the-wild study in uncovering needs and roles as they emerged over time.

We describe the research led by the performance Radical Choreographic Object (RCO). RCO is a participatory performance where the audience members respond to instructions and interactions sent to their mobile phones as well as invitations to dance from the performers.

Preparing a new dance performance involves more than learning individual steps. We are interested in understanding how dancers collaborate as they rehearse a new dance piece, with a particular emphasis on how they use physical and digital artifacts to support this process. We conducted a 12-month longitudinal observational study with a dance company that re-staged a dance piece, taken from the contemporary repertoire and unknown to the dancers. The study focused on the role that artifacts play in shaping the learning of a dance piece. We showed how dancers produced an ecology of artifacts with the aim of analyzing the choreographic ideas behind the dance and sharing them with other learners. We showed that sharing these artifacts was challenging because they are idiosyncratic and embody their creator perspective and vocabulary. We then illustrated how dancers overcome this challenge by compiling artifacts and distributing the learning task among the group in order to create a common knowledge of the piece which improves the learning process. We conclude with design opportunities for technologies supporting long-term dance learning processes.

Third wave HCI initiated a slow transformation in the methods of UX research: from widely used quantitative approaches to more recently employed qualitative techniques. Articulating the nuances, complexity, and diversity of a user's experience beyond surface descriptions remains a challenge within design. One qualitative method — micro-phenomenology — has been used in HCI/Design research since 2001. Yet, no systematic understanding of micro-phenomenology has been presented, particularly from the perspective of HCI/Design researchers who actively use it in design contexts. We interviewed 5 HCI/Design experts who utilize micro-phenomenology and present their experiences with the method. We illustrate how this method has been applied by the selected experts through developing a practice, and present conditions under which the descriptions of the experience unfold, and the values that this method can provide to HCI/Design field. Our contribution highlights the value of micro-phenomenology in articulating the experience of designers and participants, developing vocabulary for multi-sensory experiences, and unfolding embodied tacit knowledge.

I describe the research and creation journey of a choreographic dance piece called SKIN that I made with another choreographer, 3 dancers, 1 musician and 1 developer. The performance integrates interactive technologies mapping inner movement to sound and video on stage. We followed a research though practice method that includes iterative cycles of choreographic practice and interaction design. This generated a set of research questions that I address through experience explicitation interviews of both audience and creative team members. The interviews allow me to investigate the lived experience of making and attending the performance and the emergent relationships between dance, media and interaction as well as the tensions and negotiations that emerged from integrating technology in art. I discuss my approach as anti-solutionist and argue for more openness in HCI to allow artists to contribute to knowledge by embracing the messiness of their practice.

Kinaesthetic creativity refers to the body's ability to generate alternate futures in activities such as role-playing in participatory design workshops. This has relevance not only to the design of methods for inspiring creativity but also to the design of systems that promote engaging experiences via bodily interaction. This paper probes this creative process by studying how dancers interact with technology to generate ideas. We developed a series of parameterized interactive visuals and asked dance practitioners to use them in generating movement materials. From our study, we define a taxonomy that comprises different relationships and movement responses dancers form with the visuals. Against this taxonomy, we describe six types of interaction patterns and demonstrate how dance creativity is driven by the ability to shift between these patterns. We then propose a set of interaction design qualities to support kinaesthetic creativity.

The stereotype of creativity as an isolated, individual activity has given way to a more nuanced understanding of creativity as a social process. Our interview study of 23 contemporary music composers and choreographers focuses on the role that artifacts play in shaping creative collaborations with performers. We found that creators and performers form relationships where the creator acts as an author, a curator, a planner, or a researcher, and the performer acts as an interpreter, a creator, an improvisor, or an informant. Furthermore, we found that creators sculpt, layer, remix artifacts, moving fluidly across these different forms of interaction throughout the creative process. We conclude that the slippages that occur at the seams between roles and interactions drive creativity forward by opening up pathways into the future.

Our goal is to understand how dancers learn complex dance phrases. We ran three workshops where dancers learned dance fragments from videos. In workshop 1, we analyzed how dancers structure their learning strategies by decomposing movements. In workshop 2, we introduced MoveOn, a technology probe that lets dancers decompose video into short, repeatable clips to support their learning. This served as an effective analysis tool for identifying the changes in focus and understanding their decomposition and recomposition processes. In workshop 3, we compared the teacher's and dancers' decomposition strategies, and how dancers learn on their own compared to teacher-created decompositions. We found that they all ungroup and regroup dance fragments, but with different foci of attention, which suggests that teacher-imposed decomposition is more effective for introductory dance students, whereas personal decomposition is more suitable for expert dancers. We discuss the implications for designing technology to support analysis, learning and teaching of dance through movement decomposition.

Contemporary choreographers often interact directly with dancers when exploring their ideas, but lack adequate tools for capturing and documenting their work. Although our first study of choreographers and dancers revealed diverse strategies for recording choreographic fragments, we found that they all worked in terms of constraints, which they represented via spatial diagrams, as movement qualities or with their own personal notation system. This led to the design of Knotation, a mobile pen-based tool that lets choreographers sketch their own representations of choreographic ideas and render them interactive. In study two, Knotation served as a technology probe to support the contrasting practices of three professional choreographers. We revised Knotation based on their input, and ran a third structured observation study with six professional choreographers. Knotation easily supported both dance-then-record and record-then-dance strategies. Participants used and appropriated Knotation's advanced features, including the combination of interactive timelines and floorplan diagrams, to represent and explore complex choreographic structures.

Human movement has historically been approached as a functional component of interaction within human computer interaction. Yet movement is not only functional, it is also highly expressive. In our research, we explore how movement expertise as articulated in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) can contribute to the design of computational models of movement's expressive qualities as defined in the framework of Laban Efforts. We include experts in LMA in our design process, in order to select a set of suitable multimodal sensors as well as to compute features that closely correlate to the definitions of Efforts in LMA. Evaluation of our model shows that multimodal data combining positional, dynamic and physiological information allows for a better characterization of Laban Efforts. We conclude with implications for design that illustrate how our methodology and our approach to multimodal capture and recognition of Effort qualities can be integrated to design interactive applications.

We consider kinesthetic awareness, the perception of our own body position and movement in space, as a critical value for embodied design within third wave HCI. We designed an interactive sound installation that supports kinesthetic awareness of a participant's micro-movements. The installation's interaction design uses continuous auditory feedback and leverages an adaptive mapping strategy, refining its sensitivity to increase sonic resolution at lower levels of movement activity. The installation uses field recordings as rich source materials to generate a sound environment that attunes to a participant's micro-movements. Through a qualitative study using a second-person interview technique, we gained nuanced insights into the participants' subjective experiences of the installation. These reveal consistent temporal patterns, as participants build on a gradual process of integration to increase the complexity and capacity of their kinesthetic awareness during interaction.

In this paper, we investigate the value and challenges of observing movement experience in embodied design. We interviewed three design researchers selected from a CHI2014 panel on designing for the experiential body. For each designer, we analyzed a publication describing their process of observing movement experience. By analyzing the interviews and publications, we studied how these researchers observe movement and how they articulate it in their design process. From our study, we contribute a set of techniques for performing movement observation inspired by somatics and body-based practices which we define as: attunement, attention, and kinesthetic empathy. We illustrate how these techniques have been applied by the selected researchers, and also highlight the remaining challenges related to articulating, translating, and sharing the felt movement experience in the context of design within HCI. Finally, we address these challenges by arguing for further exploration of movement frameworks from the fields of somatics, body-based practices, and movement studies as specific strategies that can be applied to HCI.

The notion of “movement qualities” is central in contemporary dance; it describes the manner in which a movement is executed. Movement qualities convey information revealing movement expressiveness; their use has strong potential for movement-based interaction with applications in arts, entertainment, education, or rehabilitation. The purpose of our research is to design and evaluate interactive reflexive visuals for movement qualities. The theoretical basis for this research is drawn from a collaboration with the members of the international dance company Emio Greco|PC to study their formalization of movement qualities. We designed a pedagogical interactive installation called Double Skin/Double Mind (DS/DM) for the analysis and visualization of movement qualities through physical model-based interactive renderings. In this article, we first evaluate dancers’ perception of the visuals as metaphors for movement qualities. This evaluation shows that, depending on the physical model parameterization, the visuals are capable of generating dynamic behaviors that the dancers associate with DS/DM movement qualities. Moreover, we evaluate dance students’ and professionals’ experience of the interactive visuals in the context of a dance pedagogical workshop and a professional dance training. The results of these evaluations show that the dancers consider the interactive visuals to be a reflexive system that encourages them to perform, improves their experience, and contributes to a better understanding of movement qualities. Our findings support research on interactive systems for real-time analysis and visualization of movement qualities, which open new perspectives in movement-based interaction design.

We investigate the use of interactive sound feedback for dance pedagogy based on the practice of vocalizing while moving. Our goal is to allow dancers to access a greater range of expressive movement qualities through vocalization. We propose a methodology for the sonification of Effort Factors, as defined in Laban Movement Analysis, based on vocalizations performed by movement experts. Based on the experiential outcomes of an exploratory workshop, we propose a set of design guidelines that can be applied to interactive sonification systems for learning to perform Laban Effort Factors in a dance pedagogy context.

While single-accelerometers are a common consumer embedded sensors, their use in representing movement data as an intelligent resource remains scarce. Accelerometers have been used in movement recognition systems, but rarely to assess expressive qualities of movement. We present a prototype of wearable system for the real-time detection and classification of movement quality using acceleration data. The system applies Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to recognize Laban Effort qualities from acceleration input using a Machine Learning software that generates classifications in real time. Existing LMA-recognition systems rely on motion capture data and video data, and can only be deployed in controlled settings. Our single-accelerometer system is portable and can be used under a wide range of environmental conditions. We evaluate the performance of the system, present two applications using the system in the digital arts and discuss future directions.

In this paper, we explore the use of movement qualities as interaction modality. The notion of movement qualities is widely used in dance practice and can be understood as how the movement is performed, independently of its specific trajectory in space. We implemented our approach in the context of an artistic installation called A light touch. This installation invites the participant to interact with a moving light spot reacting to the hand movement qualities. We conducted a user experiment that showed that such an interaction based on movement qualities tends to enhance the user experience favouring explorative and expressive usage.