General ETIS Seminar: Sarah Fdili Alaoui, University of the Arts London

Performance-led research in Human Computer Interaction: methods, creations, and critical reflections

Abstract: In this talk, I trace the approaches I have followed in intersecting performance and dance with interaction design.
I describe how I apply first-person methodologies, including research through practice and ethnographic and phenomenological methods, in order to design technologies that support creating, learning, performing, and archiving dance. I describe several artworks and interactive systems that I developed in which I focus on dance vocabularies, including that of Laban’s Movement Analysis, vocabularies that are idiosyncratic to choreographers whom I collaborated with, and those emerging from my own research-creation endeavors.
I present how I choreograph dance pieces that integrate interactive technologies in order to provoke critical questions. While providing poetic experiences, my artworks enact experimental situations that enable critical reflections on how art can contribute to knowledge or how humans co-exist with each other and with technologies.

Bio: Sarah Fdili Alaoui is a Reader at the University of the Arts London. Prior to that, she was an associate professor at LISN-Université Paris Saclay and Ex)Situ INRIA research team in interaction design, human-computer Interaction, and dance. She is a choreographer, a dancer, and a Laban Movement Analyst. She was a researcher at the School of Interactive Arts+Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, within the MovingStories project. She holds a Ph.D. in Art and Science from the University Paris-Sud 11 and the IRCAM-Centre Pompidou and LIMSI-CNRS research institutes. She has an MSc from the University of Joseph Fourier, an Engineering Degree from ENSIMAG in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and about 30 years of training in ballet and contemporary dance. Sarah is interested in intersecting research in interaction design with dance-making and choreography. She has been involved in many art and science projects, collaborating with dancers, visual artists, computer scientists, and designers to create interactive dance performances and interactive installations, as well as systems for supporting choreography and dance learning and documentation.