Irini Kalaitzidi: Feeding Birds

“Feeding Birds” is a research project that attempts the poetic use of artificial intelligence (AI) in dance reading/viewing. The project involves the development of an archive of dance phrases being used as a dataset to train a Human Action Recognition (HAR) model. This technology, originally created to serve military surveillance practices, functions here as a poetic device that arranges human actions and dubs them with labels such as “feeding birds” or “folding napkins”. The dataset used to train the AI model is what will ultimately determine how the model itself will (mis)interpret the world, which label to assign to which action. Feeding it with the dataset is a process of shaping the model’s dancing memories and biases.

This research will lead to a performative act where humans and AI open a bodily and verbal conversation, like in a Telephone game where each side proposes a different reading of the same stage reality. A human dances and an AI model observes and assigns a label to the action it detects. The model returns this label back to the human as a choreographic score for his next action. A chain of successive translations: action-label-action-label and so on. In this work, the AI is invited to discuss the dancing body and trigger reflection on the ways in which we see and interpret dance.

Following a gap between the first and the second part of my Onassis AiR residency, I came back in May 2024 with the intention to create a performance where the model would engage in a chain of translations and misinterpretations between movements and labels – similar to how a game of broken phone. In this process, humans would perform an action, the AI would suggest a label for it, and humans would then perform based on that label, followed by the AI generating a new label, and so on. For this to work, the dataset’s actions needed labels beyond mere numbers, so that the AI could associate specific movements with words.

The dance artists Maria Vourou and Veatriki Kapnisi and the sound artist Nikos Tsolis were invited in this process as performers and thinking bodies that would engage in dialogue with AI. We all soon realized that the most intriguing part of the project lied in the labeling of the actions – revealing our biases, aesthetic choices, and opinions. We were faced with this impossibility that I referred to earlier when it comes to naming: creating labels and categories that could adequately contain certain movements within them.

“Feeding Birds” drew and keeps drawing inspiration from Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen’s ideas on the sorcery of categorization – the way in which the act of naming or labeling imposes an arbitrary sense of order on the infinite complexity of the world. And the process of labeling actions in order to feed an AI model becomes a kind of modern-day alchemy happening behind closed doors. Veatriki, Maria, and Nikos have playfully embraced this concept, with the latter referring to us as a sorcerous committee for naming actions. Yet, beneath the whimsical nature of this metaphor lies a serious inquiry into the power dynamics and ethical implications of AI systems that define and categorize human actions, based on their heavily biased training dataset.

For Open Day #12 at Onassis AiR, the research behind “Feeding Birds” manifested through a performance that zooms into the act of observing and labeling movements to feed an AI model – an process carried out with unwarranted certainty, despite lacking any true epistemological grounding and being influenced by the annotators’ inherent biases. The performance mirrors the confidence of birdwatchers, who, armed with their own assumptions, trust that they can accurately identify every possible bird species they observe.

With the ongoing support of Onassis AiR and Stegi’s Outward Turn Program, a next iteration of the research, this time called “Occupied with Traffic”, was realized during my time in ATLAS at ImpulsTanz, in July-August 2024. In this solo performance, I further narrow the focus to a single action (from the 52 originally), this time challenging the audience to engage with the process of naming and categorizing in a more personal and introspective way. As the project evolves, whether under the title of “Feeding Birds”, “Occupied with Traffic”, or another name that may yet emerge from my admittedly love-hate relationship with naming, it will continue to explore the (im)possibilities of movement (mis)classification through AI, and by extension, the choreographic capacity of AI through (mis)labeling actions-movements.