Techno-Neoliberalism’s Body: Dance(r) Labour in Computing Research and Race as Always Already Additive

This paper explores how fields within dance, computing, and engineering come to know each other, not so much through their shared research topics and goals, but by leveraging similar structures for organizing human labour and making returns on that labour through various forms of cultural, symbolic and financial neoliberal capital exchange. My theoretical discussion works through questions brought up by recent community dialogue involving robotics company Boston Dynamics, their dancing robots and white, contemporary dance choreographer Monica Thomas. I also pull from my ongoing research analysing a large corpus study of 135 research papers involving dancers. (Rajko, 2021) All papers were extracted from the Association of Computing Machinery Digital Library (ACM DL). Through this work, I begin to break down how computing and engineering research involving dance maintains white-supremacist ideology and deflects critique through the strategic use of politically progressive gestures. From here, I discuss how these practices perpetuate the exclusion and erasure of Black movement philosophies through the deracination of Black aesthetics—ensuring discussions of race are always already additive.

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Jessica J. Rajko

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 23-31

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[0001]Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan, USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.3

SO-VID: 59ad6530-4495-41b1-a278-dbec5a7c4d19

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.3

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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G. Coleman and T. F. DeFrantz (2019) Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies. In H. Gunkel & K. Lynch (Eds.) We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.
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D. Vyas, D. Heylen, A. EliÃ«ns and A. Nijholt (2007) Experiencing-in-the-world: using pragmatist philosophy to design for aesthetic experience. In: The 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences. Proceeding Series of ACM 2007. Chicago, United States, 5-7, November 2007. 1-16. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
J. Buolamwini and T. Gebru (2018) Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. Proceeding Series of ACM 2018. New York, 23-24 February 2018. 77-91. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.
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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] E. Callaway (2013) Cognitive science: Leap of thought. Nature, 502(7470), 168.

[2] M. Garcia (2016) Racist in the Machine: The Disturbing Implications of Algorithmic Bias. World Policy Journal, 33(4), 111ââ‚¬“117.

[3] D. Kirsh (2013) Embodied Cognition and the Magical Future of Interaction Design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 20(1).

[4] A. Kraut (2019) The Dance-In and the Re/production of White Corporeality. The International Journal of Screendance, 10, 15-51.

[5] A. Reed and A. Phillips (2013) Additive Race: Colorblind discourses of Realism in Performance Capture Technologies. Digital Creativity, 24(2), 130ââ‚¬“144.

[6] J. L. Reynoso (2019) Democracyââ‚¬™s Body, Neoliberalismââ‚¬™s Body: The Ambivalent Search for Egalitarianism within the Contemporary Post/Modern Dance Tradition. Dance Research Journal, 51(1), 47ââ‚¬“65. T. Schiphorst (2009) Body Matters: The Palpability of Invisible Computing. Leonardo, 42(3), 225-230.

[7] S. Portanova (2017) Putting Identity on Hold: Motion Capture and the Mystery of Disappearing Blackness. Computational Culture, 6.

[8] S. Browne (2015) Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, Durham.

[9] R. Benjamin (2019) Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Social Forces, Oxford.

[10] B. D. Gottschild (2016) The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. Springer, New York.

[11] A. Lepecki (2016) Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[12] G. Coleman and T. F. DeFrantz (2019) Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies. In H. Gunkel & K. Lynch (Eds.) We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.

[13] T. F. DeFrantz (2012) Circulations of Black Social Dance, In: L. Nielsen & P. Ybarra (Eds). Neoliberalism and Global Theatres. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

[14] S. Delahunta, P. Barnard and W. McGregor (2009) 28 Augmenting Choreography: Insights and Inspiration from Science, In: J. Butterworth & L. Wildschut (Eds.) Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[15] J. Leach (2016) Making knowledge from movement: some notes on the contextual impetus to transmit knowledge from dance. In: M. Bleeker (ed). Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames.

[16] K. Spiel (2021) The Bodies of TEI ââ‚¬“ Investigating Norms and Assumptions in the Design of Embodied Interaction. The Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. Proceeding Series of ACM 2021. Salzburg, Austria, 14-19 February 2021, 1-19. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[17] D. Vyas, D. Heylen, A. EliÃ«ns and A. Nijholt (2007) Experiencing-in-the-world: using pragmatist philosophy to design for aesthetic experience. In: The 2007 conference on Designing for User eXperiences. Proceeding Series of ACM 2007. Chicago, United States, 5-7, November 2007. 1-16. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[18] J. Buolamwini and T. Gebru (2018) Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. Proceeding Series of ACM 2018. New York, 23-24 February 2018. 77-91. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[19] D. F. Harrell (2009) Computational and Cognitive Infrastructures of Stigma: Empowering Identity in Social Computing and Gaming. The seventh ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition. Proceeding Series of ACM 2009. Berkeley, United States, 27-30 October 2009. 49-58. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[20] V. Iyengaret al. (2016) Motion, Captured: An open repository for comparative movement studies. In: ACM International Conference on Movement and Computing. Proceeding Series of ACM 2016. Thessaloniki, Greece, 5-6 July 2016. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[21] B. Lahey, W. Burleson and E. Streb (2012) Translation + pendaphonics = movement modulated media. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery. Proceeding Series of ACM 2012. Los Angeles, United States. 7ââ‚¬“9 August 2012. 322-329. Association for Computing Machinery, New York.

[22] E. Ackerman (2021) How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance. IEEE Spectrum. http://spectrum.ieee.org/how-boston-dynamics-taught-its-robots-to-dance (30 August 2021)

[23] F. M. Muindi (2021) The Sublime Art of Making Reparations. Essays on Reparations. http://www.essaysonreparations.org/essay-one (30 August 2021)

[24] J. Parham (2020) TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface. WIRED Magazine. http://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-evolution-digital-blackface/ (30 August 2021).

[25] J. Rajko (2021) ACM DL Corpus Dataset: A Systematic Mapping Study on Computing Research Involving Dance. Harvard Dataverse. http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/RPURHV (30 August 2021)

[26] S. Skybetter (2021) Meet the Choreographer Behind Those Dancing Robots. Dance Magazine. http://www.dancemagazine.com/boston-dynamics-dancing-robots-2651193214.html (30 August 2021)

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