MOCO’24 – International Conference on Movement and Computing

9th International Conference on Movement and Computing
in collaboration with the SPRING Performing Arts Festival

MOCO’24 ‘Beyond Control’ conference at Utrecht University

The 9th International Conference on Movement and Computing will be held at Utrecht University from Thursday, May 30th to Sunday, June 2nd, 2024. Early Bird conference rates apply until April 30th.

The MOCO’24 conference, ‘Beyond Control’ in Utrecht, marks the 10-year anniversary of the pioneering MOCO initiative, which has convened researchers from the arts, humanities, and sciences for interdisciplinary encounters at the intersection of movement and computing. Since MOCO is organized at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University this year, the conference spotlights the critical potential of exchanges between arts, humanities, and sciences.

How can arts and performance be understood as a place for exploration and inspiration, as a ‘testbed’ for new ideas relating to movement and computing? MOCO’24 presents Gibson/Martelli as Keynote Artists. Gibson/Martelli is a European art duo that works with machine learning, live simulation, performance capture, installation, and moving images to create immersive virtual realities (https://gibsonmartelli.com/).

The conference program includes paper and poster presentations from representatives of leading institutions in the research area of movement and computing around the world. Presented at the Parnassos Cultural Centre, the program also includes a selection of more than 15 Practice Works, which encompass VR installations, robot encounters, workshops, and performances – both indoor and in public spaces.

In collaboration with the SPRING Performing Arts Festival (May 23-June 1), conference participants can attend performances relevant to the conference program, including Unbearable Darkness by Berlin-based Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai, whose multidisciplinary art practice situates itself at the intersection of dance, media art and performance, and Una Isla by Agrupacion Senor Serrano, a Barcelona-based theatre company that creates original shows that combine live video, models, text, performance and objects (https://springutrecht.nl/en/homepage/).

Early Bird rates are available until April 30th. Discounted rates are available for PhD researchers, students, and Utrecht University staff members. MOCO’24 also offers a limited number of vouchers for artists for free participation in the conference. Follow the link below for more information: 

https://moco24.movementcomputing.org/, or contact Laura Karreman, Conference Chair MOCO’24 at l.l.kareman@uu.nl or moco24@uu.nl.

Theme: Beyond Control

In Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015), Seb Franklin has identified control as the cultural logic that underpins our current information economy. Drawing on critical theory, media theory and the history of science, Franklin traces how digitality can be understood as the basis of this episteme of control and explains how this may lead to modes of exclusion and dispossession: “Digitality promises to render the world legible, recordable, and knowable via particular numeric and linguistic constructs. For this rendering of the world to take place, however, there must be processes of capture, definition, optimization, and filtering that necessarily implement a distinction between those aspects of the world that are intended and included within a given digital representation and those that are excluded or filtered out” (Franklin 2015: xix).

In the interdisciplinary research field of movement and computing, the manifestation of the cultural logic of control and its deep engagement with digitality constitutes a central problem. How to prevent computation-based research from inadvertently perpetuating systems of oppression across concerns of class, race, dis/ability and gendered difference (Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018)? The event of generative AI provides another urgent prompt to examine what the implications are of this paradigm of control as a structural force in movement computation research.

Posthuman and new materialist perspectives offer one mode to examine the complex assemblages that constitute our research settings, and what they bring about in the world. Concepts such as ‘vitality of materiality’ (Bennett 2010), ‘posthuman performativity’ (Barad), ‘tentacular practices’ (Haraway 2016), and the proposal to investigate the ‘intra-action’ between human and non-human agents (Barad 2003) have focused the attention on the performative quality of technologies that we use for imagining new forms of corporeal computation.

​Another mode of approaching this problem is through research on embodied knowledge. This is a distinctive strength of the MOCO research community. At the heart of this line of approach, there seems to be a paradox at first: In order to make sense of how digital movement operates – be it in VR, motion capture, Human Robot Interaction, or other such applications -, we first need to acquire a better understanding of the phenomenological complexity of embodied movement. Such dedicated engagement with ‘embodied thinking’ (Rajko 2018) may provide the key to ‘make motion data speak’ (Vincs and Barbour 2014; Karreman 2017), whilst also revealing how data are never simply ‘raw’ (Bowker 2005), but are instead ‘always already framed when sought’ (Van Es and Verhoeff 2023: 16).

We invite you to share how your research navigates these and other challenges. What new concepts and methods emerge from making sense of new entanglements between human and non-human agents, either created in your own practice, or as observed in other settings? What could be ways of movement computation that subvert the cultural logic of control, and explore the critical space that lies beyond?

References

Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes tomatter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-831.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. 2005. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2017. Automating Inequality: How High–Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as cultural logic. MIT Press, 2015.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Karreman, Laura. “The Motion Capture Imaginary: Digital renderings of dance knowledge.” PhD diss., Ghent University, 2017.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.

Rajko, Jessica. “A Call to Action: Embodied thinking and human-computer interaction design.” In: The Routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities, pp. 195-203. Routledge, 2018.

van Es, Karin, and Nanna Verhoeff (Eds). Situating Data: Inquiries in Algorithmic Culture. Amsterdam University Press, 2023

Vincs, Kim, and Kim Barbour. “Snapshots of complexity: using motion capture and principal component analysis to reconceptualise dance.” Digital Creativity 25, no. 1 (2014): 62-78.