Presentation of Self in Machine Life

The world has been driven apart by recent events, making long distance performative mingling difficult to achieve, especially those employing in-person collaboration between humans and machines. How shall we reclaim a tangible exchange with other parts of the world that has presence and meaning, as opposed to impersonal virtual interactions? We created and choreographed an art technology performance that allows viewers in Oklahoma City to immerse themselves in a collaborative narrative space between a dancer in the US and a robot arm in City University of Hong Kong's Studio for Narrative Spaces. The performance is shown in either online or offline form to audiences, who witness the narrative of a dancer and a robot who communicate with each other through movement, sometimes leading one another, sometimes frustrating each other, as if each are present to the other across a 12 hour divide. The dancer invites the machine to dance with her, but the machine quickly realizes that while it is not human, it can do things even the human dancer cannot accomplish. However the dancer is eager to control the technology she has invited, and will stop at nothing to get it to do what she wants to do. Without viewing the machine directly, the dancer relies on limited perspectives and sounds to enable bi-directional communication. The outcome is a narratively driven art-technology-based performance that attempt to overcome the space and time separation between humans and their technology in order to establish a presentation of the extended self.