Affective ChoreographiesSusan Kozel

‘But How?’

The argument that a combination of phenomenology and performance produces affective choreographies reflects a turn towards practice or methodology. The question of methodologies, both those used to conduct research and those that research seeks to transform, has taken on an urgency in present cultural and academic worlds. This demonstrates a need on the part of scholars and artists to transform disciplinary practices from ‘within’ to account for what is ‘without’ and, in so doing, to render porous the boundaries separating the inside and outside of disciplines and institutions. Methodologies are broken into methods, recombined, hybridized, supported by tools and toolboxes, integrated, legitimized, discredited, marginalized — either as a deliberate strategy or as an act of aggression — queered, mainstreamed, instrumentalized, celebrated, or condemned; all in the quest for new constructions of knowledge and enactments of change. Anyone navigating this as an artist, researcher, teacher, or human being runs directly into multiple questions of ‘how?’ How do we access complex situations and confounding data? How do we capture them? How do we make sense of them? How do we legitimize the processes? How do we act on them while respecting Beginning of page[p. 100] the lives and histories at the centre of our research (including our own)? How can we activate our disciplinary knowledge and expertise in the face of multiple crises? How can we mobilize methodological rigour, transforming when necessary, but not throwing inherited knowledge overboard in a panic? How can we do all this ethically?

Methodological constraints and blind spots are felt by researchers at all stages, in simple as well as complex investigations. These constraints are particularly evident when affective phenomena are being explored. In one of those rare but valuable moments of spontaneous discussion at the transmediale media art conference in Berlin several years ago, a pair of presenters let down their guard and permitted their concerns to emerge. It was as if the disciplinary police (or the academic superego) had not yet awoken on that final Sunday morning. One presenter revealed the affective nuance that emerged from their careful and empathic ethnographic processes, yet, when asked to describe in greater detail the affective states demonstrated by their interviewees, they faltered. They were aware that a potent affective range was evident in their study — fatigue, powerlessness, boredom, apathy, frustration, depression — and they knew that these distinctions needed to be refined, but they could not find a way to account for such fine-grained qualitative description within their methodology. It was clear that they felt they were not permitted to let ambiguity, speculation, or, even worse, their own subjectivity enter their research processes. To do so was to risk the legitimacy of the whole project. In their words, they and others faced a significant methodological challenge in conducting the research that most mattered to them. Nevertheless, they were drawn to inquire into the sort of real-world phenomena that effectively broke their methodological and conceptual structures. They were at a loss.Beginning of page[p. 101]

The presenters were certainly not alone in this headlong collision with the conditions for legitimacy of a chosen field. This happens to many of us, in any number of academic disciplines and artistic fields. It might place us in a situation of having to plan an ‘escape route from academia’ — words spoken by a media artist at that same conference. Another option is to transform scholarship from outside but in close counterpoint with academic institutions, as has been done so powerfully by Sara Ahmed in recent years.33Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017); Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? (Duke University Press, 2019); Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021). Alternatively, we might decide to develop our ideas and practices from within, by the pragmatic means of ‘limitations, adaptations and inversions’, as proposed by A. N. Whitehead in his resonating reflections on process at the heart of reality.44A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, ed. by Donald W. Sherburne (University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 196. Or we might attempt methodological inversions by a combination of all three: within, without, and proximate.

Methodologies are practices that can bind or liberate, blind or authenticate. Those that are designed to attend to affect, and simultaneously shape it, take on a subtle and potentially invasive character. An engagement with affect invites, provokes, even requires a capacity to attend to what is happening — and this nexus of attention is where phenomenology is located. The ontological stakes of cultivating acts of attention are high, particularly when what one is attending to is barely graspable, or unsayable. Judith Butler points to this when they assert that dominant forms of representation within media coverage of war constrain what can be seen, heard, felt, read, and known, ultimately shaping ‘the lives that are marked as lives and the Beginning of page[p. 102] deaths that count as deaths’, asserting that in present times ‘our capacity to feel and to apprehend hangs in the balance’.55Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), pp. xx–xxi. They offer a parallel argument when, several years later, they claim that the ability to respond to acts of violence reaches the limits of a framework that governs what is sayable and whose lives are grievable. A new ‘compass of mourning’ is called for, one that integrates bodily responses within language and politics.66Judith Butler, ‘The Compass of Mourning’, London Review of Books, 13 October 2023 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning> [accessed 19 November 2025]. This reveals that the act of attending to something or someone is not a binary state, as in responding with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to the question ‘Are you paying attention?’ Attention is composed from acts of apprehending, noticing, performing, and speaking that can be cultivated, dampened, expanded to include other beings, or refined to respond to other states of being.77Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2017); Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (Columbia University Press, 2017).

Affect + Choreography

CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance was part of a long cycle of artistic research into archiving that investigated the potential for archival practices to enact performances of memory while simultaneously cultivating a critical stance on the massive impact of data technologies upon the bodies of people living under regimes of surveillance capitalism.88Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Profile Books, 2019). Research from the ‘Living Archives’ project can be found at <https://livingarchives.mah.se/> [accessed 19 November 2025]; and details of the ‘Somatic Archiving’ work at <https://www.somaticarchiving.org/work/catalysts-somatic-resonance> [accessed 19 November 2025]. This work uses mixed reality (MR) techniques and Beginning of page[p. 104] technologies to create a new performance out of the archival material of choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. Her work can be seen as a choreographic example of reduction for composition. Closely aligned with methods for enacting phenomenological reduction, her technique is based on the dancers’ performing a meditative practice by which processes of thought and movement are suspended, with the intention to release deeper and more intense somatic states. Guðjónsdóttir refers to these as hyper states. This practice of concentrated inner sensing produces a ‘Full Drop into the Body’ — the name of Guðjónsdóttir’s technique. Once in these states, dancers embody different affective and dynamic qualities, often accessing autonomous movement.99For a description of Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir’s work, see <https://msgudjonsdottir.com/> [accessed 19 November 2025]. A discussion of the somatic qualities of her work can be found in Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir and Susan Kozel, ‘“Full Drop into the Body”: A Conversation and Public Discussion’, in this volume, pp. 131–49.

How is it possible to engage philosophically with this work, to account for the complicated practice of somatic reduction that is evident in CATALYSTS — Catherine Jodoin’s internal rippling (Figure 2), Suet-Wan Tsang’s trance-like state (Figure 3), Laura Sigemund’s dropping into her body (Figure 4) — and to investigate the phenomenological states produced by the re-choreographing of this material into a mixed reality installation? Two layers of embodied performativity intersect in the installation: 1) that of the dancers in the archival material; and 2) that produced by the layered interactions of the mixed reality choreography (encompassing people, devices, media, and the physical space). The work can be read as a presentation of archival documentation, but it is intended to Beginning of page[p. 106] function on a deeper level, activating somatic responses to the MR choreography. These somatic responses exist partly autonomously but partly because people reflect on them; this work ‘catalyses’ by means of phenomenological reflection, which is to say that phenomenologies of affect both respond to and create affective choreographies.1010Susan Kozel, ‘Performing Phenomenology: The Work of Choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir’, in Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, ed. by Lucilla Guidi and Thomas Rentsch (Brill, 2020), pp. 196–213.Beginning of page[p. 107]

The juxtaposition of the two terms, affect and choreography, sets up a relation between philosophical thought and artistic practices. Affective choreographies becomes a frame for understanding both artistic performances and performances of daily lives, particularly within digital cultures. It integrates a philosophical understanding of the intensive forces of affect with a choreographic sensibility of bodies, structures, data, environment, and emotions being constantly reconfigured. Both affect and choreography need to be reconfigured prior to juxtaposing the terms. Not presuming to answer the question ‘what is affect?’Beginning of page[p. 108] in broad terms, I provide instead seven ways to approach affect. These do not make up anything as fixed as a definition; instead they can be seen as orientations towards understanding and moving within affective choreographies.

1. Affects are intensities. They are the ‘vital forces’ that can drive us to movement or leave us overwhelmed and suspended in non-action.1111Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Duke University Press, 2002); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25.
2. Affects are more than emotions, but emotions are jumping-off points. Affects are loosely based in emotion, to the extent that emotions have been called the ‘common currency of affect’,1212Nigel Thrift, ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86.1 (2004), pp. 57–78 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00154.x>. but the arguments and practices in this chapter define affects as more than discretely identified emotions. Nevertheless, emotional qualities saturate affective discourses and emotions entwine with the senses in affective states.
3. Affects are more than senses, but we sense affect all the time and it is possible to refine our capacities for sensing affects, which can be more liminal or more intense than the sensory register.
4. Affects are always in motion or exchange. Always shifting, they are dynamic. They shape the relations between bodies. Frequently, affect will be described in terms of an affective state or a bodily state; however, this is not intended to imply a static state, but rather

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   [p. 109] a vibrating state that is always in the process of giving way to another configuration.
5. Affects are materially diverse. The affective register includes a wide range of material phenomena, some of which might be considered immaterial, like memories, hopes, fears, and imagination, but which are no less powerful for having a different material density or existing in a different register. This is particularly relevant to choreography, where different elements make up a shifting whole.
6. There is a role for language in materializing affect. This is not to say that affective forces are transposed into symbolic exchanges, but that the attempt to describe liminal states in words is an important stage towards materializing affect. It is also a key stage in applying phenomenology to affective experiences.
7. Affects exist in potential, because an affective exchange is never fully actualized, never fully contained, but is always coming to be and passing away. This is conveyed by Gilles Deleuze when he posits the virtual and virtuality as a state of potential that permeates the very composition of bodies, for ‘we do not yet know what a body can do’.1313Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza [1968], trans. by Martin Joughin (Zone Books, 1990); and Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 226.

The artistic practice of choreography is expanding, widening what constitutes choreography and what counts as dance, at the same time as challenging who or what can be considered a choreographer. The acknowledgement that patterns of social movement can be considered choreographic is generally accepted, but can algorithms choreograph?Beginning of page[p. 110] Do animals produce choreographies? Do choreographers have to produce movement in time and space?

Dance historian Susan Foster points out that choreography as a term is used widely to refer to the structuring of movement, and not simply human movement. She offers a layered conception. Choreography refers to the kinds of actions performed, their sequence, and an overall plan or score that reveals how the movement of a whole unfolds. It can designate minute aspects of movement or the broad contours of a large terrain of multiple actions: buildings choreograph, cameras choreograph, birds perform intricate choreographies, protein complexes choreograph DNA repair, operatives in call centres engage in improvised choreographies, web services choreograph interfaces, and family therapy sessions constitute a their own form of choreography.1414Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (Routledge, 2010), pp. 2–3. The variations of scale and actants evident in Foster’s approach is complemented by the cybernetic approach offered by Michael Kliën, who prefers the term framemaking to choreography. Where choreography is a ‘metaphor for dynamic constellations of any kind, consciously choreographed or not, self-organizing or artificially constructed’, framemaking places greater emphasis on improvisational aspects of movement, setting conditions for relations to emerge. In this way it can become an ‘aesthetics of change’.1515Michael Kliën, Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change (Daghdha Dance Company, 2008), p. 21. André Lepecki contributes a related transformative perspective by anchoring choreography not just within politics but within political ontology. He unties the unquestioned alignment of dance with movement by examining choreographies of exhaustion and stillness that critique the ideological formations of late capitalist Beginning of page[p. 111] modernity.1616André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (Routledge, 2006), p. 16. He rethinks the temporality of dance, so that it is not the fleeting art form existing only in the moment and disappearing once that moment has passed. With relevance to performances of memory, he writes that being should not be confused with being-present.1717Ibid., pp. 128–29. The sedimentation of presence that makes up rituals, collections of artefacts, and the sharing of memories is addressed by other approaches to choreography, thereby opening it beyond the artistic towards a myriad of social interactions.1818Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Duke University Press, 2005); Gabriele Klein, ‘The (Micro)Politics of Social Choreography: Aesthetic and Political Strategies of Protest and Participation’, trans. by Elena Polzer, in Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity, ed. by Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher (Diaphanes, 2012), pp. 193–208 <https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/the-micro-politics-of-social-choreography-2135> [accessed 19 November 2025].

The formulation of affective choreographies continues to expand the questions of who or what constitutes a choreography; it provides a central place for improvisation; and it emphasizes the material and ontological status of movement. Crucially, it opens to an awareness of choreographies occurring within bodies. The exchange of intensities that compose affective choreographies includes the somatic dynamics of bodily systems such as the immune system, the nervous system, connective tissue, blood circulation, and rhythms of breath. Affective choreographies include memories and fears, with their traces in tissue and bone. Many somatic practices demonstrate qualities of immanence not simply for cultivating interoceptive awareness, but for activating states of change that elude clear subjective control and collapse rigid constructions of the Beginning of page[p. 112] subject.1919Examples of somatic practices include Alexander Technique, Rosen Method, Feldenkrais, Full Drop, Skinner Releasing Technique, Affective Sensibility, and various forms of movement improvisation. What they share is a first-person, inner-body perspective and a conviction that the intellect, body, and emotions cannot be separated. See Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance, ed. by Sondra Fraleigh (University of Illinois Press, 2018); Jeffrey Maitland, Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology (North Atlantic Books, 1995); Thomas Hanna, Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health (Da Capo Press, 1988). This embodied experience of slippage and opacity is captured by Deleuze, demonstrating the highly performative or practical qualities of his thought. When he discusses immanence and refers to ‘consciousness with neither object nor self, as a movement that neither begins nor ends’, he could be describing the reconfiguration of perception and subjectivity cultivated by somatic movement practices.2020Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. by Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2001), p. 26. These practices confront us with the lived reality of perpetually dipping into pre-existing flows and rhythms, with no real starting point or closure to our investigations, and no solid self as a reference point. His words on entering into the flow of movement, ‘[o]ne never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms’,2121Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [1970], trans. by Robert Hurley (City Lights Books, 1988). describe the practical experience of affective choreographies, echoed by the phenomenological description of listening provided by Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the oto- or self[auto]-produced sounds that come to mingle with received sounds, in order to receive them…’.2222Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandel (Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 16.

Affective choreographies invert two tendencies latent in traditional perspectives on Western choreography: the Beginning of page[p. 113] first is that individual dancers have control over their movements and clear awareness of the boundaries of their own bodies; the second is that a choreographic whole is bounded within time and space, composed by regulating overall patterns within this spatio-temporal unit. Addressing the first, affective choreographies require a reconfiguration of the notion of body towards a play of improvised and unexpected forces, thereby challenging many unquestioned protocols of control and direction embedded in the choreographic process. Even the valuable Spinozan formulation of ‘bodies affecting and being affected’ is inverted. Notice what happens when we imply that bodies are affected prior to bodies affecting, when we conceive of being impacted prior to exerting the agency of affecting things and people outside of us. Precarity and vulnerability become foregrounded. For Dorothée Legrand, working across phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the forces shaping bodies are real and fictional, with the subject suspending certainty about which is which in the surge of existence. Suspension is imbued with vulnerability in the process towards healing.2323Dorothée Legrand, ‘From Crisis to Psychoanalysis: Suspension as an Act of Resistance against the Reduction of Subjects’ Singularities’, in Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, ed. by Guidi and Rentsch, pp. 29–48. Similarly, in her investigation of brain plasticity, philosopher Catherine Malabou evokes improvisational choreography occurring in the brain when she describes the movement and transformation of neural pathways produced by head trauma. Impermanence and accident supersede any sense of fixed identity, for new patterns may explode upon us without the comfort of advance knowledge. This destructive plasticity enacts a form of negation that ‘frees up the possibility of another story’, but one Beginning of page[p. 114] that cannot be known or imagined in advance.2424Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (Polity, 2012), pp. 85–86. Zooming outwards, this is arguably what is happening presently with the barely controlled ripple between hope and panic surrounding predictions on the impact of AI: vast numbers of people are suddenly in the position of being affected prior to being able to affect.

Now combine this with an inversion of the second tendency in choreography, that of starting from individual dancers and regulating them within contained spatio-temporal patterns, and notice what happens when choreography is multiple, relational, cross-temporal, and cross-material. Philosophers Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin have posed a question that invites a choreographic response: ‘Instead of asking how atomized individuals form collectives, we must find out how a collective social network changes and shapes individuals, and take this phenomenon as primary.’2525Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin, ‘Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web’, in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives, ed. by Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), pp. 103–16 (p. 111) <https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/unlike-us-reader-social-media-monopolies-and-their-alternatives/> [accessed 19 November 2025]. This inversion poses a challenge to anyone trained in dance and choreography, or indeed to most artistic practices that originate in the studio prior to migrating to external locations. A guiding question could be: what might it mean to start from large-scale networked exchanges, including the large data sets required by AI, to re-choreograph or re-design relations between the individual, media systems, and the collective? The intent is not to say that everything can be viewed choreographically, but to emphasize that affective choreographies are open to diverse Beginning of page[p. 115] material composition and scales, and produce new forms of agency and knowledge.

Phenomenologies of Affect

Research in phenomenology is flourishing. Postphenomenology,2626Don Ihde, Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures (SUNY Press, 2009); Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human–Technology Relations, ed. by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek (Lexington Books, 2015). queer phenomenology,2727Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press, 2006). feminist phenomenologies,2828Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. by Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Time in Feminist Phenomenology, ed. by Christina Schües, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding (Indiana University Press, 2011); Rethinking Feminist Phenomenology, ed. by Sara Cohen Shabot and Christinia Landry (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). micro-​phenomenology,2929Claire Petitmengin, ‘Micro-phenomenology’ <https://www.microphenomenology.com/> [accessed 19 November 2025]. phenomenology of the alien,3030Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien, trans. by Alexander Kozin and Tanja Stähler (Northwestern University Press, 2011). alien phenomenology,3131Ian Bogust, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). and critical phenomenology3232Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon, Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2019); Elisa Magri and Paddy McQueen, Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction (Polity, 2023). populate a vibrant field of research responding to the need to find new ways to account for the complexity of lived experience. This work demonstrates various ways that the philosophical tradition of phenomenology is, to revisit the words of Whitehead, being adapted and inverted or, to use the language proposed in this chapter, is being performed, composed, or choreographed to meet the exigencies of our times.Beginning of page[p. 116]

Phenomenologies of affect can be considered ‘process phenomenologies’ because they are investigations of dynamic processes and are themselves processual, which is to say that they do not follow a rigid set of instructions and do not necessarily reach a final conclusion.3333Susan Kozel, ‘Process Phenomenologies’, in Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. by Maike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou (Routledge, 2015), pp. 55–74. For this reason, they exist as a series of variations and are open to further modification and adaptation. They are not, however, completely free-form. They were developed from a set of practical and theoretical shifts I myself had to make so that I could question affect in my artistic and philosophical research into archives and memory. Without these shifts I found it impossible for phenomenological processes to be able to attend to the particular intensities of affect. Affect slipped between the web of attention of even the sensory and kinaesthetic phenomenological method that I proposed in my earlier writing.3434Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2007). Practically speaking, the intensity, dynamics, indeterminacy, and liminality of affective experience made most phenomenological approaches feel like blunt tools. Affect shimmered around and through the processes of attending to it. In order to be able to get anywhere at all, the modes of attention I set in motion had to be shaped by that to which they attended.

This is not such a shocking statement if one considers the work of many phenomenologists, for even Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing on perception in the mid-twentieth century, revealed the fact that the world is shaped by our perception of it, and that our perceptual processes are transformed by what they perceive. This is Beginning of page[p. 117] at the root of his famous ‘chiasm’, where subject and object fold into one another as the seeing-seen and touching-touched,3535Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [1964], ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1987). and the vibrant, undulating world reaches out to palpate the painter.3636Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. by Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception [1964], ed. by James M. Edie, trans. by William Cobb and others (Northwestern University Press, 1985), pp. 159–90. Other, more recent phenomenological writing takes this further, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s careful deliberations of listening,3737Nancy, Listening. Sarah Ahmed’s explosion of phenomenological certainty into directions and orientations,3838Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. and Roland Barthes’s oblique and poetical considerations of the neutrality of affect.3939Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (Columbia University Press, 2005). These writers’ thought demonstrates the plasticity, responsivity, and uncertainty that permits phenomenology to be performed rather than simply used as an analytic framework.

Phenomenologies of affect can be broken down into three basic moves. As with affective choreographies in the section above, these moves do not make up a solid definition but can be approached as critical and creative reorientations.

Technologies: From the Sophisticated to the Banal

CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance requires a custom-made app for it to function.4747The app CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (AR/MR/VR) systems and applications are no longer regarded as sophisticated technologies, but the goal of this artistic project was never to foreground complex or sophisticated technologies, nor was it to indicate that reaching for latest-generation tech is the best way to boost creativity in digital cultures. The opposite is more accurate: we do not have to reach for complex technologies; the complexity Beginning of page[p. 123] and sophistication are coming to us. And by this I do not mean that we have increasingly ‘smart technologies’ at our disposal, as Westerners with disposable incomes and increasingly disposable technologies. The technological sophistication that is available to us, or even forced upon us, now occurs largely in the algorithms and analytics that are performed on the data extracted by our devices, in the networking protocols that link these devices, and in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) increasingly embedded in the functionality of these devices. Frequently, the algorithms exist to ‘personalize our experiences’ or to enable devices to become better at ‘helping us’, for example, to avoid mistakes or to compose entire texts. Instances of the encroachment of algorithms into our personal lives are numerous and range from the shocking, such as the recordings of domestic life by Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa being routinely listened to by engineers to ‘improve’ its functionality, to the banal, as in the location tracking performed by almost every app, whether or not this is required for the service. The example I now offer seems to lie on the banal end of the spectrum. It is an instance of algorithm-supported mistake avoidance, but, when examined critically, this small autocorrect glitch reveals wider implications for the policing of corporeality. It also reveals how affective micro-events can linger, provoking phenomenological reflection.

I sent a message on the messaging application WhatsApp to choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, referring to her strangely successful meditation experiment using Zoom that connected people in several European countries.4848This online meditation experiment took place during the COVID-19 lockdown. I wrote to her that I felt a palpable quality of Beginning of page[p. 124] shared experience, calling it a sort of ‘morphic resonance’. I was reflecting on how affect operates through the resonance of bodily practices even across distances using mediated platforms, and suddenly found myself thinking that this was a way of revitalizing Rupert Sheldrake’s controversial coining of this expression from the 1990s with possible links to Hartmut Rosa’s more recent work on resonance.4949Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press, 1995); Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of our Relationship to the World, trans. by James C. Wagner (Polity Press, 2019). I discovered some time afterwards that WhatsApp’s autocorrect function had intervened and translated ‘morphic’ resonance into ‘moronic’ resonance.

Easy to dismiss at the time, and perhaps trivial, yet the more I thought about it the more objectionable it became. This is not simply because the word is an anachronistic slur pertaining to neurodiversity but because it points to widespread algorithmically induced normativity operating even on micro levels. I could not escape the sense that this was yet another example of an inbuilt bias against bodies and diversity in our technological systems. As with everyday sexism, such a bias makes itself known in ways that span the banal to the shocking — often both at the same time. Consider the embodied and cultural biases embedded in how facial recognition is least effective for women with dark skin,5050Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed by Men (Vintage, 2019); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York University Press, 2018); Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity Press, 2019). how speech recognition applications are constructed around the so-called ‘Harvard sentences’ of the white male voice,5151Within computer science, and dating back to 1965, ‘Harvard sentences’ refers to a collection of 720 sample phrases considered to be phonetically balanced. These samples, featuring an educated male American voice, are used for the implementation and testing of VoIP (‘voice over IP’) and other telephone systems. Currently they can still be found in speech recognition software. and how the emoji skin tone modifier Beginning of page[p. 125] is constructed in Unicode with white as a default colour,5252Roel Roscam Abbing, Peggy Pierrot, and Femke Snelting, ‘Modifying the Universal’, in DATA Browser 06: EXECUTING PRACTICES, ed. by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass, and Magda Tyżlik-Carver (Open Humanities Press, 2018). to say nothing of predictive analytics and the homogenization of bodies and movements enacted by many network protocols and internet-of-things-activated devices.5353Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2021); Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021).

A sensitivity to this flattening of difference, and to the imposition of a hierarchy of values, coincides with a desire for things to be otherwise with our designed systems. But even more than this, the work of feminist philosophers does not only argue for different forms of agency and subjectivity but begins by first noticing when people and bodies have been ‘eclipsed’. Malabou uses this word when she argues that the category of woman is not biological or cultural but refers to a subject ‘overexposed to a specific type of violence or negation’, like the way the bodily sensibility of a morphic state is negated by the basic AI embedded in WhatsApp.5454Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident, pp. 2–3. This act of calling attention to norms and biases that are so embedded as to be invisible, whether subtle or egregious, is at the heart of intersectional and decolonial scholarship.5555Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019); Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘R-words: Refusing Research’, in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Sage, 2016), pp. 223–47. A choreographic understanding of norms takes note of how they shape the movement of Beginning of page[p. 126] people and institutions. More so, choreographers are experts at working the eclipse; they can either make their presence evident or hide their influence so that movement seems spontaneous or improvised.5656Jonathan Burrows, A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010), p. 33. This means that a choreographic perspective can do more than identify obvious patterns of movement — it can foster an awareness of when movement is shaped by structures and forces that operate on hidden levels.

Reductions

This chapter began with Klein’s piercing and reorienting of the word hallucination, as used by AI developers to describe the fictions and mistakes of large language model (LLM) generative AI chatbots that are confidently presented as truth. Klein points to an unacceptable crisis in accountability when the tech sector appropriates a word used in psychology, psychedelics, and mysticism to prop up its ‘cherished mythology’ that current developments in AI ‘are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species’.5757Klein, ‘AI machines aren’t “hallucinating”’, p. 2. Her argument is not based on a battle over who owns the word. Starting from the embodied state of hallucination, followed by a material analysis of the current functionality of AI, then moving towards a frightening extrapolation of its potential uses, Klein can be seen as enacting a variation of phenomenological reduction to launch a cultural critique.

CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance, together with nineteen other artistic research projects funded by the AUTONOM initiative, performed related reductions by Beginning of page[p. 127] grounding algorithms in the creative embodied practices of the performing arts. Unsurprisingly, the reflections and the work that was produced reveal diverse and highly critical engagements with algorithms relevant to artistic practice and to society.5858The criterion for receiving AUTONOM funding was to work in performance and live arts to engage creatively with algorithms. See AUTONOM, ed. by Bergmann; and Susan Kozel, ‘In the Half-Light: Phenomenological Approaches to Complex Technological Systems’, in The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology, ed. by Maaike Bleeker and Norah Zuniga Shaw (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). As part of the CATALYSTS development process, we questioned AI, evaluating its potential use for kinaesthetic and somatic choreographies. We were particularly cognizant of how algorithms used to analyse what exists can easily be adapted to shape what has not yet happened and be used for prevention and control. This pivotal moment when AI analytics becomes AI predictive analytics was decisive for us, resulting in the decision not to import additional algorithms or AI beyond what was already embedded in the basic software developer tools that supported the camera recognition and visual processing we needed to obtain a minimum but stable level of functionality.

Recognizing that the artistic intention in creating CATALYSTS was to work with deep somatic layers and to provoke affective responses, we cultivated a stance of extreme care over which AI-enabled tools we used and which algorithms we developed ourselves (or chose not to develop). We crafted a statement of guiding principles:

As artists,

• We crack open our existing tools to see the algorithms that already exist (we open the ‘black box’ to the best of our abilities),

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• We decide which ones we want to keep and which ones to deactivate (if we can), like location-tracking and personal data capture,
• We choose to activate algorithms based on our choreographic and ethical principles.

We recognize that we are not entering a new field, nor are we entering a domain that is purely computational. This is a dense and provocative field with precedents, tensions, conflicts, and both overt and hidden agendas. We join a wider social movement towards seeing and challenging AI’s power by working with algorithms, not by avoiding them. We maintain the right to refuse to implement algorithms simply because they exist. Working with these contentious choreographies of affect, we can be utopian, but we can’t be naïve.Beginning of page[p. 129]

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Data Society Research Program of Malmö University in Sweden. CATALYSTS — Somatic Resonance was supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, NEUSTART KULTUR #AUTONOM; Malmö’s Inter Arts Centre (IAC); The Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture; Open Spaces festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin; WUK performing arts, Vienna; and the ICI Berlin for its premiere in 2022.

Further, I would like to acknowledge the support of the Department of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Florence (DILEF, Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia). The seminar series ‘Technology and Embodiment’, which I led while I was a visiting professor at DILEF, helped to refine the ideas.