Living Archive by Wayne McGregor
November 2019 | By Wayne McGregor in collaboration with Artist in Residence at Google Arts & Culture Lab: Bastien Girschig
Strike a pose and create your own choreography – with a little help from machine learning.
Collection:
What happens when you combine artificial intelligence with an award-winning choreographer’s archive?
Google Arts & Culture Lab collaborated with Wayne McGregor to turn his archive into a creative tool, using machine learning. Now, anyone, anywhere can take inspiration from McGregor’s body of work to create their own piece of dance.
Create your own choreography
Living Archive uses U-MAP to map almost half a million moments of movement from Wayne McGregor’s 25-year archive, and organises them by visual similarity.
Choose a selection of poses and connect them together to create your own piece of choreography here.
Feeling adventurous?
Strike a pose using your camera to find your closest match in the archive here.
How Wayne used the archive in his creative process
McGregor used a more advanced choreography tool, trained on 100 hours of video footage from his body of work, in the creation of Living Archive: a performance experiment. The work premiered at LA Phil in July 2019.
We also worked with artist and filmmaker Ben Cullen-Williams to create AI generated visualisations for the performance, using a tool developed at the Lab. Go behind the scenes and explore the tool here.
Team: Pamela Peter-Agbia