PreciousCamouflage
Charlotte Triebus
x MIREVI
Dance & AI, Stage, Installation, Lecture, 2024
Four dancers of New Human Body Society encounter four AI agents in real time.
- Duration
- 60 minutes
- Format
- Performance for Four Dancers and Four AI Agents
- Premiere
- 6 June 2024, tanzhaus nrw, Düsseldorf
In Charlotte Triebus’s stage work Precious Camouflage, a large installation of LED elements becomes the setting for this exchange. The systems can perceive, decide and act independently, influencing both the choreography and the live action on stage.
AI agents generate plausible images of people who could exist, interpret bodily and political content, and appear to draw moral boundaries. What does this mean for movement and dance? Who holds the authority to interpret a body? What does it mean when generated material tries to appear as convincingly human as possible?
Featurette
English Subtitles
The stage work and the artistic research behind it, with English subtitles.
Play featuretteTrailer
1 min 59 sec
A short introduction to the bodies, choreography and stage world of the work.
Play trailer
Research & Process
The stage work grew from studies of how bodies and AI systems can perceive, translate and influence one another.
Conversation StudyDancers and AI systems observe and reinterpret each other’s responses in a continuing loop.
Each response becomes material for the next interpretation. Movement passes between bodies, images and language; the exchange makes misunderstandings and changes of meaning visible. Triebus investigates how communication develops as dancers and AI agents interpret one another.
Adversarial PatchesPerformative textiles investigate a body’s ability to choose when it becomes visible to machine vision.
Developed with AI, the woven fabrics combine visual patterns with retroreflective threads. Worn or arranged around a body, they test how recognition can be interrupted or redirected. Visibility becomes a question of autonomy, identity and the use of personal data.
Choreographic AssistantAn AI joins the choreographic process through images and text, proposing material for the dancers to interpret.
Prompts about unusual movement and hiding from technology generate images that feed into rehearsal. Dancers and AI systems interpret one another’s contributions. Earlier image-translation experiments also explored how dancing bodies could become waves, foam, rocks and water.
The politics of training data
The research also examines how training data carries cultural assumptions into machine perception. Questions of representation, exclusion, licensing and authorship are part of the artistic process. Making the selection and preparation of datasets visible offers a way to question what systems learn, whose bodies they recognise, and what their classifications leave out.
Selected Presentations
5 December 2025
Erich-Göpfert-Stadthalle, Unna
14th Westphalian Cultural Conference
Lecture Performance, Precious Camouflage: The Code
29–30 August 2025
17–26 January 2025
13–14 November 2024
6–8 June 2024
“The choreography, combining theoretical research and artistic practice, brings specialised technologies into art and artistic perspectives into science.”
“The dancers repeatedly challenge whether the human body can retain the power to act and make decisions in its engagement with artificial intelligences. Precious Camouflage negotiates the boundary between developing alongside technologies and critiquing them with nuance and intelligence.”
“Fazit: Die Lücke zwischen Verstehen und Verkanntwerden hat man noch selten so deutlich vor Augen geführt bekommen.”
Credits
- Artistic direction
- Charlotte Triebus
- Original Cast
- Yurika Sophie Yamamoto
Annalise Van Even
Esther Siddiquie
Misha Ostenrath - Cast, Mülheim 2025
- Yurika Sophie Yamamoto
Kevin Beyer
Esther Siddiquie
Felicia Nilsson - Research
- Aaron Samuel Davis
Felicia Nilsson - Costume
- Flora Miranda
- Music
- Sergej Maingardt
- Light Design
- Markus Fuchs
- Stage
- Louisa Robin
- AI technology and software development — Unit 1
- vobe.digital
Christoph Vogel
Michael Bertram
Marius Gripp - AI technology and software development — Unit 2
- MIREVI Lab (HSD)
vobe.digital
Kester Evers
Lisa Glosowitz
Mirjam Claassen
Niklas Tluk - Financial Management
- Ivana Družetić-Vogel
- Project Management
- Henriette Droß-Duplacic
- Design Assistance
- Julie Farré
Machiel J. Borger - Technical support
- tennagels Medientechnik, Düsseldorf
- Studio assistance
- Jonas Becker
Production & support
Produced by Charlotte Triebus in collaboration with MIREVI. Co-produced with tanzhaus nrw.
Scientific support and technical implementation: MIREVI, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences.
Unit 1: Funded with NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.
Unit 2: Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance tanz:digital by German Dance Association.
