Two dancers, one machine. A fragile relationship unfolds under the gaze of an AI system that reflects but cannot truly understand the humans it observes.
What starts as a mirror image of their actions becomes something more insidious: a presence that distorts, intervenes, and reshapes how they see each other and themselves.
Inspired by Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror and with music by Galya Bisengalieva, described as a ‘powerful force in new and primordial music’, Mirror fuses dance, live motion capture, and generative AI in a philosophical and emotional exploration of what it means to be human in an age of algorithmic judgement.
It asks: what happens when we trust in machines, more than each other, to show us who we are?
DATES:
15-30 May, Hessisches Staatsballet, Darmstadt
4 June, RBO/Shift Festival
Consider the image that appears in your bathroom mirror every morning. The body in the mirror is not a second body taking up space in the world with you. It is not a copy of your body. It is not even a pale imitation of your body. The mirror-body is not a body at all. A mirror produces a reflection of your body. Reflections are not bodies. They are their own kind of thing. By the same token, today's AI systems trained on human thought and behavior are not minds. They are their own new kind of thing - something like a mirror. They don't produce thoughts or feelings any more than mirrors produce bodies. What they produce is a new kind of reflection.”— Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror
