“KLOF” (<FOLK> dance spelled backwards) is a multidisciplinary art research of choreographer Irina Demina in collaboration with computer scientist David Samu, that explores the possibilities and potential of a dialogue between traditional and digitally stimulated choreography. At the heart of this research are the questions:
*** How should we be dancing together on the threshold of (unknown) past and (uncertain) future? **** How can we imagine new futures of the dancing body? *** What will be strategies of “togetherness” in the post-human world?***
“KLOF” combines the vocabulary of folk dances with digital technologies of machine learning, making choreography become familiar with the logic of technical-scientific regimes. It experiments with how technological narratives and traditional dance practices can “inspire” each other. On the interplay between tradition, technologies, media, fictional identities and techno-spirituality “KLOF” attempts to create a “hybrid” practice of “new” togetherness. It is about process, change and transformation. The boundaries between the natural and artificial life are increasingly dissolving, that raises the question, how the nature of ”traditions” can be redefined.
These experiments appropriate the media of motion capturing and machine learning technology in order to explore new possibilities for the generation of “hybrid” dance vocabularies.
----------- What is the meaning and the strategies of sharing and co-presence nowadays? -----------------------
Different stages of this research work have been supported by Tanzpraxis Berlin, Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, WIESE eG, DIS-TANZ-SOLO (funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the NEUSTART KULTUR program, aid program DIS-TANZEN of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland)