The Critical & Creative AI Studies Lab At Emerson College to Present Featured Speaker Sydney Skybetter

The lecture, entitled Clock, Fall: A Brief History and Speculative Future of Dancing Murder Robots, will take place at CoLab at the Iwasaki Library, 120 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116 and online through Zoom. Registration is required for both in-person and Zoom attendance, and is available at https://forms.gle/B3cRdpL3cBJuHtX87. More information can be found at https://websites.emerson.edu/data-fluencies/news/.

Sydney Skybetter is an Associate Professor of Choreography and Technologies at Brown University and Faculty Director at Brown Arts Institute. 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.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as "One of the world's foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies," Sydney's choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob's Pillow.

He has lectured at the University of Cambridge, 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 frequent 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 Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.

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