Rhizomatiks Research x ELEVENPLAY

Rhizomatiks Research and ELEVENPLAY collaborate with Kyle McDonald for their newest work. This engaging dance performance follows the emergence of mathematics in relationship to the human body, exploring perception and our physical modes of expression through a complex set of emerging technologies. “discrete figures” incorporates drones, motion capture for sensing the dancers, and augmented reality for providing a peek into the computational abstractions behind the performance. Drones act as an extension of the body, motion capture feeds a machine learning acting as an extension of human perception and action.

Starting with the origins of math in counting on bodies, we follow its history through to present day. Inspiration is drawn from Alan Turing, who applied mathematics to explore the disembodiment of the brain from a corporeal host. In a sense, Turing went so far as to expand the concept of the body into an external, non-corporeal realm. Turing saw the mechanical bodies of computers as an extension of his own flesh.

Turing thus gave birth to one physical incarnation of mathematics. His creations are the embodiment of the act of performing mathematics. Although his contemporaries would see a sharp delineation between human and machine, in his eyes, his progeny did not constitute a distant “other”. Rather, he was the father of a “living machine.”

How might mathematics manifest itself as physical expression? What binds human cognition and philosophy to a human being's body? How might this connection dissolve or transform in time?

An expansive multidisciplinary collaboration between mathematicians, dancers, media artists, composers, and engineers, this complex experimental performance is truly the first of its kind. This newest dance performance probes the circuitry connecting the corporeal to the cognitive, questioning the very essence of humanity and machine.