Bodies That Dance Alone
(Petra, Mexico, 2025, 4:45)
Credits
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Director: Petra
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Runtime: 4 minutes 45 seconds
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Completion Date: January 10, 2025
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Country of Origin: Mexico
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Aspect Ratio: 1:1
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Film Color: Color
Description
This piece explores the body in movement as a system of control and liberation, using artificial intelligence to generate synthetic choreographies that challenge the oppressive norms of society and dance practice. A performer trains an AI model with their gestures, creating abstract sequences that deform and multiply reality. The choreographies blur the boundaries between the human and the artificial, celebrating the diversity of bodies and proposing a new paradigm in which imperfection and indeterminacy become acts of resistance.
Director Biography – Petra
Petra (Mexico, 1993) is an artist exploring the intersection between body and virtuality through movement and digital experimentation. Their work combines creative coding, machine learning, computer vision, animation, and screendance, investigating how technology redefines identity and embodiment. Petra’s works have been presented internationally at ASVOFF 16, Miami Art Week, NFT NYC, MIVA Festival, and London Fashion Week, among others.
Programmer’s Notes – Blas Payri
The main interest of this work lies in its use of AI errors as creative material. The resulting figures are grotesque and hybrid: bodies with extra limbs, distorted anatomy, and movements that defy gravity.
These transformations come from AI video generation applied to real dance images, producing surreal interpolations that reveal both the potential and the instability of current machine-learning tools. The noisy, glitch-based soundtrack reinforces this sense of continuous instability, turning the entire piece into a visual and sonic distortion.
This work captures a moment in technological art history when imperfection becomes expressive. These early AI distortions may eventually disappear as the technology improves, leaving behind a strange nostalgia for the original flaws.
