Short abstract:

We analyze how professional dancers and quadcopter drones moved together with attentiveness and synchrony, communicating through a kinesthetic vocabulary we call a language of lines. We reflect on how this language will impact how we inhabit worlds with other biological and socio-technical agents.

Long abstract:

To better understand liveliness, agency, and rapport among people and robotic socio-technical agents, scholars of Science and Technology Studies, Cybernetics, phenomenology, and more-than-human anthropology advocate for social-relational approaches with specific descriptions of how exactly these relationships develop over time. Here, we present a cybernetic analysis of a contemporary dance production, Lucie in the Sky, in which quadcopter drones and dancers move with attentiveness and synchrony, conveying humour, sadness and even wisdom; betraying that their bodies are unlike. Through two years of multi-sited ethnographic research, we observed how attentiveness and synchrony relied on a careful construction of space and an orientation of agents within the space, relayed through a mutually understandable vocabulary we call a language of lines. Foundational to this language was an intermittently real and a constant spectral 3D grid filling the practice space, encasing all performers, and facilitating a creative lexicon between dance and drone choreographers, who threaded words, numbers, and bodily movements through points, lines, and trajectories to create closeness and connection. Over many months, bodies began to fold in the coordinates of the space; lines running through neurons, blood and sinews of muscle, and through circuits, memory-chips and plastic-casing. Bonded by invisible traces, above and beyond what was conveyed through intentional movement, a kinesthetic relationship emerged through shared rules of movement. We share this vocabulary in anticipation of the implications it may have for how people, social robots and other beings inhabit worlds, each’s embodiment and agency more diffuse, overlapping and convergent.