As a starting point, our question for you is: what escapes computation in interactive performance?
Put another way, how must one look, or what must one do in order to become visible and affect change in a given system or interaction? Further, who or what is responsible for that which eludes capture?
Here is our own provocation, to invite provocations…
As technologies and techniques traverse disciplinary cultures by way of appropriation and collaboration, the question of what escapes computation must be considered not only on an individual and local level, but with regard to the effects of inscribed bias and systemic inequalities.
With this ongoing, open call for provocations we invite interrogation regarding ways in which gestural and physiological processes are rendered visible and audible—or conversely, imperceptible—through the inscription, prescription, and description of identifiable parameters of movement.
The construction of the frame of reference within which bodies, movements, and interactions become computable and representable must be considered in relation to the design of hardware and software, within the mappings that generate sonification, biofeedback, and biocontrol (including with machine learning and artificial intelligence), and within choreographic and compositional approaches to interaction.
We ask you to probe what is excluded, implicitly or explicitly, from conceptions of gestures, bodies, and technologies within your own practices of research in the arts and sciences. In this reflexive move, en masse, the goal is to expose the processes by which we each differentiate our motives, methods, and modes of sharing—in relation to entangled personal, disciplinary, and socio-cultural contexts.
-John MacCallum and Teoma Naccarato