As curator of an exhibition entitled Dancing the Algorithm which inaugurated the Doris Duke Theatre Gallery at Jacob’s Pillow in 2025, Katherine Helen Fisher reflects on dance, archives, technology, and what becomes possible when choreographic thinking enters into conversation with the systems that are increasingly shaping contemporary life. Archival audio excerpts are drawn from a 2025 PillowTalk with Katherine Helen Fisher, Lauren Bedal, and Xin Ying.
Learn more about host Katherine Helen Fisher
View excerpt of Lamentation: Dancing the Archive on Dance Interactive
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach and performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, with content from the Pillow Archives and from our artistic community. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow's Historian and Founding Director of Preservation. Today's episode is hosted by director and choreographer Katherine Helen Fisher, curator of an exhibition entitled Dancing the Algorithm, which inaugurated the gallery space in the Pillow's Doris Duke Theatre in 2025. In this podcast, Fisher and some of her colleagues reflect on dance, archives, technology, and what becomes possible when choreographic thinking enters into conversation with the systems that increasingly shape our contemporary lives.
Katherine Helen Fisher: The stage has always been a meeting place for bodies and tools, movement and mediation, perception and design. As choreographer Sydney Skybetter has argued for years, dance has never existed apart from technology. Light is a technology. The pointe shoe is a technology. The proscenium stage is a technology.
Each of these does more than support performance. Each one changes what a body can do and the kind of world a performance can bring into being. So when we talk about dance and emerging technology, I do not see a break with the past so much as an extension of a much longer history. Dance has always evolved alongside the tools and conditions of its time.
What feels different now is the scale and intimacy of that relationship. Technology is woven into our daily lives. We wear it, we speak to it, and increasingly, it speaks back. In a moment like this, embodied knowledge cannot be secondary. The question is not whether technology is shaping contemporary life. It is whether artists will have a seat at the table, bringing their own forms of intelligence to what these systems become. It's my hope that projects like Dancing the Algorithm help insist on that. My curatorial argument for this exhibition was to make space for choreographic expertise — not only on the stage, but as a way of thinking through the cultural conditions these technologies are producing.
I first came to Jacob's Pillow 25 years ago as a performer, dancing on the Inside/Out stage with the amazing dance maker Janis Brenner. To have returned in mid-career as a guest curator in a brand-new building, with an exhibition asking how dance lives inside the algorithmic age, has felt meaningful on a level I am still metabolizing. What made Dancing the Algorithm so engaging to work on was that as a cohort, each artist came to this intersection through a different necessity, a different relationship to dance. We did not arrive with the same questions or from the same edge of the field. What we shared was a belief that embodied knowledge matters and that dance has something specific to offer the technological conditions of the present. Let's listen to an excerpt of the 2025 PillowTalk with myself, Martha Graham dancer Xin Ying, and choreographer and human-computer interaction designer Lauren Bedal. Norton Owen invites each of us to trace how we got to this shared belief.
Norton Owen: So I wonder if we could start with a little bit of origin stories. Each of you has led a life that is different than most regular dancers, and also different than most technologists. If you could each give us a sort of thumbnail history of what your journey has been and how you came to do the work that you're doing now, starting with you, Kate.
Katherine Helen Fisher: Norton, thank you so much. It's a huge honor to be here with you, and thank you to the team at the Pillow and to our team at Dancing the Algorithm. It's a huge, huge honor to be here.
I think I would start when I realized that I was not going to be able to dance forever at the same ability that I had been used to dancing. In the middle of my career, I had danced with MOMIX and some other companies where we really toured hard — we'd do like 300 shows a year sometimes. And I was also aware that I didn't own my own image. Sometimes I would ask for footage and that was proprietary to the choreographer. So this led me to think about archive and preserving my body in form. I got really interested in photographic forms and started making dance films.
From there, I started working with interactive technology. I started partnering with a company, StandardVision, in Los Angeles, who manufactures these monolithic LED screens, and we had some commissions to make dance films for those that wrap around big skyscrapers. I got really excited about dance film as public art and broadening the audience of dance and media.
Norton Owen: And had you already stopped dancing by the time this was happening?
Katherine Helen Fisher: No, no. I was still dancing. It was really great — I was working with Lucinda then—
Norton Owen: Lucinda Childs.
Katherine Helen Fisher: Yes. For about half the year, and the other half of the year I'd be furiously starting the company that my husband and I founded, Safety Third Productions. Just wearing different hats — I think all dancers these days are really multi-hyphenate, because it's so difficult to sustain a living in this field.
Norton Owen: Were there any seeds that you can think of now? As we progress through a career, there are things that you look back on differently than maybe you felt them at the moment. Did you experience anything like that — any feeling like, "Oh, I have these other interests that maybe all the other dancers around me don't have"?
Katherine Helen Fisher: Totally. I was raised in a really religious household, and media was really restricted for me. So when I got to NYU for undergrad, I discovered film studies, and I was studying that concurrently with dance — just amazed at the films of the world. We studied French New Wave and all sorts of genres. My eyes were opened, and I was really in love with that form.
And then I got to work with Lucinda, who collaborated with Sol LeWitt — a visual artist who made a beautiful film projected on the downstage scrim of Dance, her historic work that was made in 1979, the year I was born. I toured that work for many years, and seeing Sol's visual language in collaboration with Lucinda's choreographic statements, I felt like: this is what I have to do. This kind of extended cinema and movement.
Norton Owen: And turning to Ying — we have seen you perform quite recently here at the Pillow. I wonder if you would talk about how you got to where you are at this point, and what that journey has been for you.
Xin Ying: I came to New York in 2010 for Martha Graham, from China, and I fell in love with the technique right away. The contracting and release just really spoke to my body, and I realized: emotions generate your body. There's a certain energy that emotion can give you, even the negative ones. That's what taught me the most — because I came from a Chinese classical training background, where as a female dancer you always have to be very pretty, a certain expression you have to maintain. Graham really taught me how to just go for it, be raw.
And then throughout the years — I'm from the generation that was still using DVD players. We would carry a whole book of discs. And then later on, in 2012, we had Hurricane Sandy.
Norton Owen: Hurricane Sandy affected the Graham Company in particular—
Xin Ying: Yes. A lot of archive material was lost, and that made people think about how we preserve it. We started changing our mindset. Everything started to become digital — now you just have a link and you watch it. I'm from that generation, so we always knew technology was part of how we preserve, how we protect.
In 2018, Graham did a Google residency, and I was one of the choreographers and dancers in that. I had so much fun, and from there I saw technology giving you a tool—
Norton Owen: So Lauren, how about you in terms of both dance and technology? How did you get to be here?
Lauren Bedal: Thank you again for having me and for the invitation to this exhibition and to all of the fellow collaborators. It was quite the journey. I studied dance at The Ohio State University, and the program was very multifaceted. It had dance and technology, dance film, so many different facets, and it was there that I was really exposed to this idea of dance and technology.
Norton Owen: Did they have a motion capture studio already when you were there?
Lauren Bedal: Yes. They had the ACCAD lab — the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design — led by fabulous people, including Nora Zuniga Shaw and others who worked on very iconic work such as Synchronous Objects. That's where I had a real light bulb moment — that this could be a career, or that there was a facet within the dance industry that catered toward more technological exploration.
Norton Owen: And that light bulb moment was happening for you even while you were in undergraduate school.
Lauren Bedal: Yes. And then after graduation, I moved to San Francisco, at the height of Silicon Valley and the tech boom. As a designer and choreographer, I was living with a roommate who was working in virtual reality, and he brought me over one night. He was talking about an experience he was building in 3D space, and he was saying, "We're trying to figure out these problems of how objects are moving in space, how this person should transition to this other area of the room." And these ideas came so naturally to me because of my choreographic background. That was the second light bulb moment — my background in choreography could actually inform how we design experiences in virtual reality and other spatial computing arenas.
I started speaking about this intersection of how dance could inform the design of spatial computing experiences for consumer products, and it actually led me to be recruited by Google — to a small research and development team called Google Advanced Technology and Projects. They worked on hardware devices and the future of how people interact with technology. My task on this R&D team of artists, designers, and researchers was to bring a choreographic perspective to how we design embodied interfaces — thinking beyond mouse and keyboard, beyond tapping a screen, really using the full body to interact with computers.
Norton Owen: And has your dance work continued?
Lauren Bedal: I would say it's challenging when you're working full force in the tech industry, especially on these fast-paced R&D teams. It takes a lot of discipline to maintain various aspects of your creative work. But my artistic practice still continues. I still maintain a media art practice, which is related to what's in the exhibition. The central theme of both my work in the tech industry and my media art practice is how computers understand and perceive human movement.
Katherine Helen Fisher: For me, this exhibition was not about presenting technology as novelty, nor was it about surrendering to technological inevitability. It was an invitation to the multi-generational dance audience of the Pillow to move physically through these systems and reflect on how emerging technologies are reshaping human experience. It was an opportunity for the Pillow community to play in front of cameras and screens, using algorithmic systems to multiply and extend the body, and to enter into physical conversations with dance icons of another century — like Martha Graham, Talley Beatty, and Ted Shawn — with newly possible production tools like generative AI and volumetric video.
I think many of us can sense that the tools shaping our world now arrive with enormous consequences attached to them. They are changing the conditions under which labor is performed and privacy is negotiated, while also reshaping authorship and access. They are altering how human beings are surveilled, diagnosed, simulated, and yes, entertained. So this work, which I see as an expanded genre, is not about deciding whether technology is good or bad. It is about asking what kinds of futures are being built through these tools, who gets to shape them, and who is left out — what they make possible, what they threaten, and also what they may preserve. I'm thinking here, too, about what might be preserved through Jacob's Pillow's archives, and whether these extended techniques that allow dance to move beyond the limits of live movement might widen the audience for dance while still honoring the embodied knowledge it carries.
In this next clip, Norton Owen poses one of the central questions of the exhibition: what becomes possible when technology enters into dialogue with dance?
Norton Owen: What can technology do that can't be transmitted just by a dancer performing for an audience? That's a very big question, but Kate, because you are curating this exhibition — everything that we're seeing in the exhibition space in the Doris Duke Theatre is your concept of what you wanted audiences to see in this initial exhibition.
Katherine Helen Fisher: I can't take credit for all of that, because Pam and Kim and I had many meetings where we extensively discussed artists, and it was really a dialectical conversation where we went back and forth. I really appreciated that. And this whole process, which has been about a year in the making, springing from the Digital Futures think tank with Katie Cuan and Grisha Coleman and Sydney Skybetter and Shamal Pitts — just really incredible artists — being in dialogue with them, with not really a clear initiative, just to be in dialogue about these issues, has been life-changing. And so this work kind of springs from that, and also from delighting in the fact that I've spent over 25 years in the field and I know people. It's really nice to be able to seam all of these histories together.
But what I would say is: people hear the word "cyborg" or "transhumanism" and they feel afraid — understandably, and there is fear in this. We don't know about the tsunami that's heading towards us and how rapidly the technology is increasing. But we are already cyborgs. We see our world through our phones. Not to say that we have to bring that into dance, but I think it would be dishonest if we didn't fold some of that mediated worldview into the practice.
Norton Owen: So you're saying we're already there in some ways.
Katherine Helen Fisher: We are there. And it's okay to resist it — there's space for that. But I think it is also okay to welcome it in and say: "What is this? How does this affect my perception of reality and time and gravity and embodiment?" And I think when we shut ourselves off from the technology but we're still using it so pervasively, we can tend to do this with our bodies. But I want, like what Lauren is saying, to be really expanding into it.
Lauren Bedal: Expansive. Expanding into it.
Katherine Helen Fisher: In Lauren Bedal's 30 Points of Departure, a voluptuous silver dancing figure appears on a human-scale vertical screen just inside the entrance of the new Doris Duke Theatre. The dancer's skin shimmers like liquid mercury. Seen through the glass from the surrounding gardens and grounds, the work beckons visitors inward as the figure serially materializes across a chain of AI-generated iterations. It is mesmerizing to watch because it feels both familiar and unstable, as though the image is being conjured in real time. The body seems to emerge even as it dissolves, never fully settling into a fixed form.
What I appreciate about Lauren's perspective as an artist is that she does not treat technology as something added at the end. She understands it as material — something that has to enter the compositional process from the beginning if it's going to shape the work in a meaningful way. To me, that is a deeply choreographic idea. Let's listen to Lauren describe her approach, as well as her invitation to the next generation of artists.
Lauren Bedal: I think it's been interesting to see this from both angles: from the angle of developing technology and interactive experiences for consumer products, and then looking at that from more of the artistic realm. I think within the dance industry there's a common view of technology as being something that's, for lack of a better term, slapped on at the end. You have your piece, you develop the choreography, and then you introduce technology. Whereas when we develop interactions and technology from the very beginning, the design and the choreography are there from the very beginning of the process and continue throughout to the final result. So when you get a final result, you can feel there's a tangible quality — that choreography and that thinking have been imbued from the beginning.
That's something I would encourage the next generation of dance artists using technology to think about: think of it as a material. Think of it as a way that you can imbue throughout the entire choreographic life cycle — from ideation, from working with your dancers in the studio, iterating on certain concepts, bringing in other themes, having time where you're exploring multiple different technological approaches to the same problem. Some artists get hung up on a cool workflow or a cool app to use, where that might not be the only way to get an artistic concept across. So when I think of art and technology and dance and technology, and how we can begin to think of that as a dance community, I'm hoping we can start to shift. There's a perspective shift that needs to happen — to think of technology more as a material that choreographers have in their toolkit from the very beginning.
Katherine Helen Fisher: I love that language — technology as material. That way of thinking shaped Lamentation: Dancing the Archive. I first brought Xin Ying, Kate Ladenheim, and Alan Winslow into conversation through my class, Hyperreal Spectacle, at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where we were experimenting with volumetric video and interactive design. At the same time, I was developing responsive systems in TouchDesigner through Hyperreal Labs. So when Ying began capturing Lamentation in volumetric video, I saw the possibility of making it interactive, allowing the installation to respond to audience gesture in real time. Here, Ying shares what led to the breakthrough around this unique approach to reactivating the archive of Martha Graham.
Xin Ying: For example, a piece like Lamentation — from the audience point of view, it's obviously very iconic. The shape is very American modern aesthetic, like a sculpture. But for me, I'm always thinking about how hard the tube is, how you have to stretch it out, keep the shape there. You feel the vibration inside. You feel the sweat dripping off your body. And I was thinking: what kind of tool can I use to bridge that gap?
That's what I'm very interested in — how to reactivate the archive through technology. And then I went to school at NYU. I just graduated this past May — I just got my MFA in dance interdisciplinary research — and I spent pretty much half of my time at NYU Tisch ITP, where the technology focus is very strong. That's where I actually met all my collaborators, on the same day that I discovered volumetric video. I was thinking: this would be so great to put Lamentation in volumetric. Then the audience can interact with it. You can stretch, you can turn, you can actually see much more up close. And most importantly, when you're watching and interacting with it, you have to dance — it forces you to dance with the archive. Then you have a sense of the embodiment the dancer is experiencing.
Katherine Helen Fisher: For me, this is one of the most beautiful ideas in the whole conversation. The archive is not there to be kept at a distance. It can be entered. It can become a site of encounter.
That question of encounter was also at the center of Bodies in Hyperreality, the other work I co-authored for the exhibition with Dr. Mingyong Cheng and my partner Shimmy Boyle, both extraordinary computational media artists. The piece is a real-time, audience-driven choreographic interface. Two virtual mirrors face each participant. One shows a live video feed. The other shows a hyperreal AI-generated scene shaped by historical dance prompts developed in collaboration with Jacob's Pillow's archivists Patsy Gay and Norton Owen, alongside prompts submitted by the audience.
Using images from the extensive Jacob's Pillow archive to custom-train the models, we created a system in which a visitor might suddenly see themselves transformed through the visual memory of the Pillow — not as a passive viewer, but as someone entering into relation with that history.
What was so compelling was watching people realize they were not just viewing the piece — they were activating it. Someone might walk by and suddenly see themselves as Twyla Tharp. They might lift their arms and encounter a flamenco dancer, or pose with a friend and find the system conjuring the image of two ballet dancers in a lift. People began testing shapes, gestures, even scarves and long skirts to see what the StreamDiffusion model might return. Some jumped out of the live feed in surprise, then slipped back in to experiment more deliberately. Others stayed for a long time, trying to discover every possible permutation of the machine's vision, using their own bodily knowledge to figure out what kinds of movement the system could recognize.
There were also moments when the gender, race, or body type of the generated figure did not neatly match the person standing there, and that revealed something important. This system was not simply responding to the live participant but to the visual logic of the archive. What moves me about the piece is that it does not use AI simply as spectacle. The most powerful moment is when someone realizes they have agency within the work, even as they are also submitting themselves to it.
That moment is not just interactive — it's choreographic. And that is where Jacob's Pillow and the Doris Duke Theatre start to feel especially important to me, not just as a venue, but as a laboratory. In this clip, my collaborators and I answer a question from the PillowTalk audience about how to train dancers on these tools for exploration.
Katherine Helen Fisher: What Jacob's Pillow is doing with this initiative is part of it. We purchased screens. We purchased really high-powered computers that use NVIDIA graphics cards that run these technologies, and sensors. Having that equipment in the studio with you as you create is a huge part of it — so it's access.
Xin Ying: I feel like when young dancers come to see what the Pillow has to offer, they want to be that artist. Then everything will just go from there. I was using DVD players; now we use links. NYU students already know how to use their phones to edit dance films, producing short dance films practically every single day. They're mastering the software really well already. So it's definitely getting there, and they're very great at picking things up.
Lauren Bedal: I would build on that and say both access and technology literacy around how we even talk about this. There are a lot of barriers to entry right now. Even if we had the best motion capture systems and the best technology, there is still the question of how we talk about this and how we bring those concepts into dance education within universities. Ohio State is one of those places. Jacob's Pillow is another, where technologists and choreographers get together and have these conversations. I imagine a lot of it will come down to technological literacy — starting to explain these concepts with metaphors and in ways people can understand.
Katherine Helen Fisher: To design speculatively is to work experimentally, making room for what is not yet fully known. But that kind of discovery requires continuity, and too often artists lose access to these tools just as a real relationship is beginning.
Many artists encounter these systems only briefly — in school, in a lab, in a residency — and then lose the conditions needed for the dialogue between body and machine to deepen. Work can reach the stage before it has had time to fully mature, and when that happens, these tools can appear purely novel, which only reinforces the skepticism many audiences and presenters already have about integrating technology and dance.
Some of that hesitation is understandable. Bringing emerging technologies into dance can provoke real anxiety about liveness and what may be lost in the exchange. But too often we get into a binary feedback loop asking, "Is technology good or bad?" As Alexander Whitley notes, this dualistic way of thinking — that technology is either savior or destroyer — is problematic. The really interesting conversations and learning are to be found in the nuance and the acceptance of the inherent tension and ambiguity.
In that liminal space, the ethical stakes of this work also begin to come into view. These systems can expand access and deepen inequality at once. They can open artistic possibility while also accelerating extraction. What matters then is not arriving at a simple verdict, but asking how these systems are structured, who benefits from them, and what kinds of values they reproduce.
Authorship also matters here in terms of ethical considerations. Dance artists already know what it feels like to have ideas lifted without adequate context. Choreographic knowledge has long been vulnerable to that kind of extraction, and artistic research can be absorbed, reverse-engineered, and recirculated by others as if it were their own. In emerging technology contexts, that problem only intensifies.
If we want a healthy art and technology ecosystem, institutions have an important role to play. They can either widen the field of support or continue consolidating power around the same small circle of already visible artists. That's why bringing emergent work into institutions matters. But bringing this work into institutions with long histories is not frictionless. It asks everyone involved to tolerate uncertainty. It requires real investment and a willingness to stay open when something does not fit the usual template for how dance is presented. That difficulty is also where the reward lives. When an institution is willing to stretch, it can do more than host emerging work — it can help make that work legible, and it can give artists the conditions to take risks in public, with technical support and with trust.
In this next clip, Norton Owen turns the conversation directly toward the ethical terrain of the exhibition.
Norton Owen: Because you're dealing with a kind of performance where what dance has always meant has been the human body — sort of human body to human body. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the overall sense of how this work might be different than that, and what are some of the questions that brings up for you. Ethical questions.
Katherine Helen Fisher: Yes, for sure. I'm super interested in learning more about this. Kim and I actually went to a conference in New York at NYU with a group of performance and theater makers. A female director spoke to us — she basically did a mic drop in front of all these presenters. She said: "If you use these technologies, you are wrong. You are using precious mineral resources. This stuff isn't just going off into the ether. Every time you ask ChatGPT a question that you don't need to ask, you are using actual, real energy in the world." And it was scathing. I was terrified.
But there's another argument, which is that there is a very rarefied number of people — Lauren is among them — in this world where people tend to have very similar educational backgrounds, class, race, gender. So my argument is: we must bring these tools into the arts so that we can author the technologies, so that artists have a hand and a voice in this. Because as we train the machine learning, we offer our own bodies — our non-normative bodies, our neurodivergent minds. I think it's very important that we have that breadth of experience.
So yes, the network that Mingyong and Shimmy and I built is running StreamDiffusion, which is using energy, and it's going to be in the gallery. And we spoke about this: let's limit the time that we're running it so that people can see it and understand it and be in front of it, but that we're still thinking about the ethical implications of using it.
Norton Owen: That's fascinating. It brings up a whole other line of thinking — not just looking at an artwork hanging on a wall, but so many other complicating factors. I wonder if there are other thoughts from either Lauren or Ying about what's different here — any feeling of, "I'm in a different realm than I would have been if I was just making a dance work or just making a technology widget."
Lauren Bedal: There's a lot to unpack here on many dimensions. I'll choose one. What I find interesting — and this pertains to choreography, but broadly to anyone living as a creative person in today's society — is that some of these tools are making us question what human creativity is and what authorship is. With generative AI in particular, you can see there's a shift of agency from the person to the machine. There's a dial of authorship leaning from empowerment of people toward delegation — you're delegating something to the computer. As we as a society develop technologies that start to automate things on our behalf, those questions start to come into play.
Katherine Helen Fisher: What happens to our understanding of creativity when some of these systems are built around delegation? That's not a settled question, but it is exactly the kind of question I believe artists should be asking right now.
That is why I keep returning to the role artists can play here — not as evangelists or a cultural stamp of approval, but as people trained to notice relation and embodiment, the things that can get flattened when these systems are treated as neutral. Dance has something specific to offer this conversation because it already understands that intelligence is carried through the body.
What I hope for in my work as a dance maker is that it can belong to a field that stays curious in this moment of change. And what I hope Dancing the Algorithm makes possible is a lived encounter — a chance to move through the urgent questions these technologies raise within a beloved legacy institution that honors dance while making space for the very human possibilities of the present that are only just beginning to reveal themselves.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: That's it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at DanceInteractive.JacobsPillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our Festival and throughout the year.
Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or on-site.