Hilary Bergen Artist Talk

Please join us on Friday, February 12th from 1 - 2 p.m. (EST) for a talk by Hilary Bergen. Please RSVP for this event here.

In this talk, Hilary Bergen will speak about her current interests— including the choreography of CGI Instagram influencer Lil’ Miquela and Boston Dynamics’ dancing robots. She will also share a recent research creation project she did using Japanese animation program MikuMikuDance (MMD), a Microsoft Kinect and the choreography for Kate Bush’s cult classic song “Wuthering Heights.” This project considers not only how the organic dance body persists in data and animated renderings, but how the digital body might possess its own lively dance potential.

Bio: Hilary Bergen is a professional dancer and a SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montréal where she studies screendance, posthumanism and feminist media history. Her research explores dance as a field and practice that can help articulate the desires of a feminist approach to technology studies. She has published work on the feminization of digital assistants (Word and Text), rotoscoping as dance notation (Screening the Past), the use of military technologies to capture dance (Culture Machine) and the spectacle of female disembodiment in the choreography of fin de siècle dancer Loie Fuller and contemporary dance artist Freya Olafson (Archée), among other topics. In her PhD dissertation, she is working at defining a “posthuman theory of dance.”