Monolith is envisioned as a performative dialogue between two performers where only one of them is human. The second performer, the Machine, will be able to exhibit sentient behaviour - reflect on its own actions, predict and provoke emotional reactions from its human counterpart.

This installation, developed during our S+T+ARTS Air residency, works as a showcase of the first iteration of the Machine’s Brain, focusing on the ways it can predict a dancer’s emotions, by looking at their movement.

Through workshops with world-class dancers and choreographers in Athens and London, we were able to explore the enormous range of physical expression available to the human body, and observe the characteristics of their unique improvised performances in front of an imaginary machine.

Using the latest state of the art methods for human pose detection we were able to capture the human body in motion and use the data to train our own AI model to classify motion in 7 emotional categories.

As the visitors interact with the installation through movement they can catch a glimpse into the Machine’s brain- observing how it perceives and interprets the human presence.

Monolith invites audiences to witness a fusion of art and technology, where the boundaries between human and machine blur. It’s a space for dialogue, discovery, and re-imagining the nature of creativity in the age of intelligent machines.