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Apr 24 2024

Lecture and Event Recordings

Algorithmic Millennium: Creating Staged & Digital Games – Feb 4, 2025

What does experimental performance have to do with video games? How do emerging media provide new landscapes for diasporic narratives? How can live and digital bodies perform and resist algorithmic control? The BMO Lab’s winter keynote will explore these questions and more with two of Canada’s most exciting young artists: Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Remy Siu, of the multimedia performance collective Hong Kong Exile and the video game company Sunset Visitor. Their conversation with Dr. Doug Eacho aims to explore transpacific politics, vocal performance, motion capture, the state of electronic dance music, uses of allegory, anime fashion… at least.  

BMOLab · Algorithmic Millennium: Creating Staged & Digital Games – Hong Kong Exiles at BMO Lab

Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theatre, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Oct. 3 2024

In this talk, Dr Chun introduced her forthcoming book, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theatre, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, which draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in 20th century China. This unique approach to Chinese theatre history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theatre details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theatre amid the political upheavals of China’s revolutionary century. 


Beware of Robots: Performance, Questions of Technology, and a Strong Program for Theatre Studies with Professor Ulf Otto – Mar. 27, 2024

This talk shows how prevailing ways of making scholarly sense of performance are challenged by the consideration of technology. It tracks down the changing meaning of technology in the course of a cultural historiography of theater; and turning to the transdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, proposes a relational materialist concept of technology. 


Staging Infrastructure: Universal Child Care with Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, Mar. 8, 2024

Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken discuss their production Universal Child Care, and the process of developing the work.


From Digital to Dressing Room: Hair Theory, Technology, and the Styling of Black Women on Broadway – Christin Essen – Mar. 1, 2024

Essin’s research draws sharp focus to the skilled Broadway professionals whose use of analog and digital technologies prepare the bodies of actors to perform. Even costume technologies as small as a hairpin, she argues, have the potential to unlock the situational and cultural complexities of backstage labour. 


Symposium: Interpolations 1 – Oct. 21, 2023

a one-day symposium at the BMO Lab devoted to the interfaces between computational media and the performing arts. A dozen scholars of digital performance, VR theatre, the tech industry, computational dance, and more gathered to chart connections and pathways for this increasingly vital area of research.


Session 1: Virtual Sensoria, w/ Elizabeth Hunter, Elise Morrison, Jessica Rajko


Session 2: AI as Theatre, w/ Miriam Felton-Dansky, Christopher Grobe, and Lindsay Brandon Hunter


Session 3: Still Exhausted: TDR Launch Panel, w/ Catie Cuan, Douglas Eacho, and Sydney Skybetter


The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Commodification
Keynote address: Annie Dorsen and Sam Gill 
Responses: Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Sarah Bay-Cheng


Artists’ talk with the creators of asses.masses – Sept. 20, 2023


AI Salon – Text to Image Generation – April 14, 2023


AI Salon – Text Generation and Large Language Models – March 31, 2023

We explore the recent developments in Large Language Models such as ChatGPT., talking about how they work, giving detailed examples of the generation process, testing out many prompts on various models, and discussing the many implications of these systems.


Black Movement in Digital Spaces – LaJuné McMillian – March 2, 2023

Lajuné McMillian discusses the exploitation, erasure, and dilution of Black movement and Black culture historically through appropriation, the evolution of Black face, and the commodification of our existence. “


Relational Dramaturgies – Imanuel Schipper – October 25, 2022

A lecture by Imanuel Schipper, dramaturg for Rimini Protokoll.



AI As Foil Series: Hacking the Voice – Friday, Mar 18, 2022

A discussion with Toronto vocalist Fides Krucker, and London beatboxer Reeps One (Harry Yeff)


AI as Foil Series: A New Musical Frontier: AI Meets Music – Oct 8, 2021

A discussion with music producer Annelise Noronha and AI scientist Sageev Oore


Canadian Stage Festival of Ideas and Creation 2021

Presentations of the activities of the performers-in-residence Sebastien Heins, Ryan Cunningham, Maev Beaty and Rick Miller at the BMO Lab.


AI Generated Text: GPT-2 and Performance – May 18, 2021


Voxels: Invisible motion sensing triggers in performance – May 19, 2021


Live Motion Capture and Performance – May 20, 2021


AI as Foil Series: The Essence of Style: AI Meets Fashion Design – Feb 19, 2021

A Discussion with fashion designer Daniela Bosco and Idris Mootee, CEO of Urbancoolab


Diagonal: “Enchanting Infrastructure: New Approaches to AI” – Feb. 5, 2021

How should the recent explosion of research, investment, and discourse around “artificial intelligence” be critically understood? 


Hacking Choreography: Kate Sicchio – Dec 2, 2020

Dr. Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology.


AI as Foil Series: The Automation of Beauty: AI’s Role in Architecture – Nov 27, 2020

A discussion with architect Thomas Payne and Francesco Iorio, CEO of Augmenta AI


AI as Foil Series: Moves Like Moon Watcher – Oct 9, 2020

A discussion with Dan Richter


ARTificial Intelligence: AI and Creativity Distinguished Lecture – Allison Parrish – Aug 28, 2020

A lecture by distinguished computational poet Allison Parrish.


Kyle McDonald – Artist Talk, March 2, 2020

An artist’s talk by groundbreaking AI artist Kyle McDonald.


Friedrich Kirschner, ’Spiel und Objekt’, Sept 19, 2019

A presentation by Friedrich Kirschner of the Ernst Busch School of the Performing Arts, Berlin.

Written by David Rokeby · Categorized: Blog

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