Harvard University And MetaLA Announce Spring Keynote Seminar

Harvard University's Mahindra Humanities Center Theater and Performance Seminar and metaLAB (at) Harvard announce its spring keynote seminar Clock, Fall: Choreorobotics and Near Futures of Choreographic Practice, presented by choreographer and Dean at Brown University, Sydney Skybetter.

The seminar will be held in the Barker Center, Room 110 on Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 5pm. For more information, visit https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/spring-keynote.

A livestream of the presentation will be available on Mahindra Humanities Center's Youtube, and a recording will be available on Youtube after the event is over.

Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion - human or otherwise - move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, "Dances with Robots." In this presentation, Skybetter will cover topics ranging from Boston Dynamics robots, Tesla's "Party Mode" and Optimus robots, parasitic aesthetic theory, the movie M3GAN, Artificial Intelligence, and a little bit of Beyoncé.

About Sydney Skybetter

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Sydney's choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob's Pillow. He has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital "Wild Futures" Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB (at) Harvard University, a contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, "Dances with Robots." Sydney serves as the Deputy Dean of the College for Curriculum and Co-Curriculum, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure. www.skybetter.org

About metaLAB (at) Harvard

metaLAB (at) Harvard was founded in 2011 and is an institutional unit within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, where it is involved in the Center's research efforts in such domains as artificial intelligence, social justice, internet governance, cybersecurity, and the law. It is physically located on the 4th floor of 42 Kirkland Street within Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Because design practice is fundamental to its ethos, metaLAB maintains close ties to GSD faculty, students, and academic programs, as well as to Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

About Mahindra Humanities Center

The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard brings insights from deep, patient, and immersive work in the humanities to bear on the most urgent questions of our time. The Mahindra Humanities Center began in 1984 as the Center for Literary Studies. It became the Humanities Center in 1996 and was renamed in 2011 following a generous gift from Anand Mahindra, Harvard College '77, in honor of his mother Indira. Anand Mahindra was a concentrator in Visual and Environmental Studies-now Art, Film, and Visual Studies-at Harvard.

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