Christopher Knowlton
he/him
Christopher Knowlton | Artist in Residence 2024 | Photo © William Frederking
Christopher Knowlton is a transdisciplinary movement artist, scientist, dancemaker and engineer who uses emerging technologies to create augmented performance work. His artistic practice centers on how movement technologies like motion capture, wearable devices and biosensors can give insights to one’s self, each other, and the surrounding world.
Past research has manifested as an interactive motion capture exhibit that gives embodied insight into quantum mechanics. Another recent project featured dancers with wearable muscle sensors driving an immersive landscape to explore echolocation and non-verbal accessibility of dance for people who are blind or low-vision. Drawing on Christopher’s background as a biomechanics researcher, these experiments utilize the scientific process to give visibility to the intrinsic information held in the body through movement.
In making these human-centered interactive technology-based artworks, Christopher seeks to understand what moves people to move, how to mediate kinesthetic empathy, and how to improve accessibility and autonomy in dance for both performers and audience.
Extended Play, 2021 | Photo credit: Kristie Kahns
The Project
With support from High Concept Labs, Christopher Knowlton is exploring the deification of new technologies, the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for dance, and the distinction between generative and extractive AI.
Extended Play (2022) in Elevate Chicago Dance 2022, produced by Chicago Dancemakers Forum | Photo credit: Ricardo E Adame
Christopher sees machine learning’s potential to exploit and appropriate movement as a direct threat to sovereignty over the moving body and the intangible cultural heritage that is dance. The foreboding application of AI for dance and performance begs questions of bodily autonomy, cultural property and the functionality of this emerging technology.
Through an open and self-critical practice, Christopher will question if the advent of “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” imply the evolution of computer cultures and techno-religions. This project, tentatively titled ‘Deus ex Machina Doctrina’ (Latin for ‘God out of Machine Learning’), will look at parallels between religion and technology, including their contributions to colonization and imperialism.
As Christopher strives to craft a generative machine learning model for dance movement, he will for the first time explore working directly with coding instead of pre-made AI tools. This process of collaging new and existing coding will mirror the process of building a new movement vocabulary, prompting Christopher to reflect on his own curiosities and biases around dance, digital augmentation and the function of religion on a personal and societal level. The culminating public presentation will be experienced as an immersive performance and interactive installation.
Tuli Bera and Nejla Yatkin in Echo Network (2023) with projections by Enki Andrews and smartphone sound app by Bill Parod | Photo credit: Bill Parod
About the Artist
Christopher Knowlton is a transdisciplinary movement artist and research scientist who uses emerging technologies to create augmented performance work. Having trained in contemporary dance and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chris moved to Chicago to complete his Ph.D. in Bioengineering at University of Illinois at Chicago. Inspired by science, nature, play, improvisation and human-centered approaches to design, he has produced many solo and collaborative dance works that have been featured locally and internationally, spanning dance, film, new media, puppetry and storytelling. Chris was a Chicago Dancemakers Forum 2020 Lab Artist, a 2022 Ragdale in Schools Fellow and a 2023 Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Resident Artist. Chris is also a biomechanical research scientist and manages the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Rush University Medical Center.
For more information, visit chrisknowltondance.com
