The Machine Movement Lab (MML) project is an arts-led research project that seeks to trouble and expand our relationships with machines. Co-founded by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders in 2015, MML brings together dance improvisation and posthuman dramaturgy with robotics and machine learning, grounded in an enactive, performative framework. It is a collaboration with dancers, choreographers, AI researchers, engineers, and numerous materials—from cardboard, PVC tubes, plywood to aluminum framing, motors, motor controllers, cables, cable binders, and software programs – across robotics labs, dance studios, fab labs, and gallery spaces.
The project seeks to challenge conventional hierarchies in robotics by bringing together dancers' corporeal thinking and kinaesthetic empathy with machine learning to shape a more horizontal playground for human-machine encounters. Current visions of our near future with robotic companions are fuelled by a desire to render things more alive and relatable by blurring the differences between humans and machine-things.
Yet merely producing shallow reflections of us, this assimilation effort perpetuates the exclusive hegemonic politics that dismiss and demobilize the matterings of less privileged humans and nonhumans alike. Things mirroring (human) bodies thus only imprison both bodies and things in mimicry and servitude.
MML, in contrast, seeks to trouble our relationships with machines to both demystify and re-enchant machine-things (see Taussig, 1993). Re-enchanting things in our practice highlights the material-performative potential inherent to things and solicits collaboration rather than control. Embracing and aesthetically foregrounding the asymmetries between humans and machine-things by physically and dramaturgically entangling them, MML gives rise to strange trans-bodily resonances. Rather than serving to make the strange look more familiar, aesthetics here is about rendering differences relational.
The Machine Movement Lab—in a nutshell—explores the playground that is opened up by enacting agency through movement dynamics and how this sets the stage for carefully attending to a dancer’s body entangling with an artefact and how the two mutually extend each other, spatially and affectively. A core premise of our relational-performative approach is the notion of agency as enactment. Agency, in other words, is brought forth in the encounter of bodies and/or things; it is not a property that a machine can be imbued with. Karen Barad’s agential realism (2003, 2007) rethinks the construct of interaction, which assumes two separate, pre-existing entities with built-in agencies. Barad’s concept of intra-action, in contrast, acknowledges how subjects and objects co-constitute each other and emerge in the dynamics of the encounter.
This website explores the project’s evolution over the years, tracing a journey from its inception in 2015 to the latest stages of research development in posthuman performance-making from 2019 to 2023.
The Machine Movement Lab project brings together various, distinct research projects that have been partially supported by various funding bodies:
- Performative Body Mapping—designing the Cube Performer (2016-2019): Australian Research Council (ARC) [DP160104706]
- Dancing with the Nonhuman—performance-making as research tool (2019-2023): Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [AR 545]
- Human-Robot Experience (HRX)—diversifying and making participatory human-robot interaction (2021-2025): the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC) [FT190100567].