The Critical & Creative AI Studies Lab at Emerson College presents acclaimed choreographer and Director of Brown Arts Institute, Sydney Skybetter, as a featured speaker on April 3, 2025 from 12-1:45pm. The lecture, entitled Clock, Fall: A Brief History and Speculative Future of Dancing Murder Robots, will take place at CoLab at the Iwasaki Library, 120 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116 and online through Zoom. Registration is required for both in-person and Zoom attendance, and is available at https://forms.gle/B3cRdpL3cBJuHtX87. More information can be found at https://websites.emerson.edu/data-fluencies/news/.

Sydney Skybetter is an Associate Professor of Choreography and Technologies at Brown University and Faculty Director at Brown Arts Institute. Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion – human or otherwise – move through space and time to generate meaning. In “Clock, Fall,” Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building.

This event is sponsored by the Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. For more information about the Critical & Creative AI Studies Lab, please visit: https://websites.emerson.edu/data-fluencies/.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at the University of Cambridge, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.

www.skybetter.org

The Critical and Creative AI Studies (CCAIS) Lab is an interdisciplinary research space that brings together artists, scholars, and artist-scholars to question and explore artificial intelligence through both critical inquiry and creative practice. Centering embodied knowledge and practice-based research, the CCAIS Lab examines AI’s dangers and possibilities and its societal impact while generating new forms of knowledge at the intersection of humanistic inquiry, artistic creation, critical thinking, and technological practice. The CCAIS Lab aims to imagine and pursue more equitable futures in relation to AI and society and contribute to establishing the emerging field of Critical & Creative AI Studies.

The CCAIS Lab is supported by the Emerson College Research Hub.

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