GayAI Gaze

May 2024

This video showcases a recent dance + CreativeAI collaboration completed in May 2024 after around ten meetings over six months. This performance lasts six minutes. It features three dancers and a digital art projection. I approached Robbie Button to experiment with combining dance and AI. Robbie Button was the center dancer. The other two dancers are Elena Bruce and Erin Co. I created the digital art projection using Creative AI. I filmed Robbie's dance and converted his dance into minimalistic dance animation using BlazePose, a 3D pose estimation model developed by Google in Unity. The resulting stick figure animation mimics the dancer, acting like a fourth dancer on the stage.

The minimalist stick figures and dark backgrounds are chosen to essentialize dance. They reveal the changing positions of body joints. What's more, stick figures are also what dancers draw when they want to record their dance moves on paper! Sometimes, the stick figure glitches, causing the whole scene to jitter as if under the influence of shock waves, speaking to the idea of deviating from the norm underlying the theme of the performance.

This work examines two norms: the beauty standard in mainstream gay culture and body posture norms in machine learning models. Gay men who don't conform to the beauty standard may be overlooked by others, just as unconventional poses can lead to misidentification by algorithms. Both groups, gay men and machine learning models, reflect a limited ability to recognize non-normative bodies.

Overall, combining AI and dance enriches the meanings behind the work, revealing the limitations of the AI technology and the nature of dance.