Machine Learning at Play

These days you’re hard pressed to use the internet without running into artificial intelligence. AI is becoming increasingly embedded in everyday processes, primarily in the form of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Opinions on the applications and ethics of AI vary widely, with some seeing it as the next frontier in work productivity and technological possibility, while others envision something much more sinister: the destruction of humanity as we are made obsolete by the rise of superintelligent machines.

Performance

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener: “Open Machine”

Place

NYU Skirball, New York, NY, September 19, 2025

Words

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener's “Open Machine.” Photograph by Paula Lobo

Artists likewise run the gamut between AI accelerators and doomers: museums have begun to present AI-assisted work, while labor advocates wrestle for worker protections against AI. Plenty of artists drift in the murky middle, weighing the risks and potential to enhance creativity. Choreographers are no exception, and curiosity was the engine of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s “Open Machine,” which had its premiere at NYU Skirball on September 19 and 20.

The artists and their media design collaborator, creative technologist Jesse Stiles, define their use of technology not as AI but as “machine learning systems used to create live media.” It includes a panoply of programs used for live transcription (Whisper), body tracking (MediaPipe), 3D modeling (Gaussian Splatting), and video transformation and synthesis (StreamDiffusion). Each element converses in real time with the bodies on stage, in isolation or layered in tandem, to create a unique performance experience that interrogates and illuminates technology through the most powerful tool available to all artists: play.

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener's “Open Machine.” Photograph by Paula Lobo

Indeed, a sense of play suffuses every moment of the work, from the virtuosic to the absurd. Amid the beauty and chaos of it all, one thing remains certain, a golden thread running taut through a tangled web of possibilities: their “Open Machine” is consummately alive. This life pulsates through performers just as it courses through the data that transmits their words, images, and imaginations to the array of speakers and screens around them. In this arena, technology doesn’t merely serve as a design element, nor does it attempt to hide. Three large screens hang from the proscenium frame, spanning the width of the stage space; each performer wears a microphone, and a small, brick-like pack and snaking wires nestles within each brightly-colored costume. Live sound builds layers over Charmaine Lee and Mas YSA’s musical ground, which rings and titters through sparse, rounded hums and whirling cacophonies. Davison Scandrett bathes the stage in gray gloamings, lurid washes of neon, and softly-puddled rainbows; the house lights rise, dim, and flicker to further unsettle our perception.

The work’s arc forms a complete circuit, opening and closing with the same image: a column of performers filed still and neutral at center stage. From this ordered lineup springs a stunning range of possibilities, guided by a series of games that define the parameters of the performers’ active decision-making in movement and speech. As they navigate their individual choices, each performer remains acutely aware of the others around them, together creating a corpus of material for the technologies to take in and reinterpret. Bodies are rendered as stuttering clusters of letters or juddering images of the words they speak; in one section, their live, larger-than-life forms become doppelgangers hovering in a technological firmament.

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener's “Open Machine.” Photograph by Paula Lobo

Mitchell and Riener, who met while dancing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, work in a movement language that expands formal structures by guiding the dancers through investigations of shape, plane, and vector. This language makes every body part available for just about anything. Formal gestures of the arms and legs—Chaery Moon’s gleaming arabesque, Morgan Amirah Burns’s expansive second positions—channel through articulations of spines, ribs, hips, shoulders, hands, chins, and collarbones. Savannah Gaillard’s serene power sets off Jennifer Gonzalez’s writhing, livewire precision, which punctuates the work’s opening and closing. Each of the luminous performers—Gonzalez in particular—show a command of texture, tone, and speed that calls to mind both the pliancy of flesh and the sharp edges of machines.

Amid the shining certainty of these generous bodies, a sense of uncertainty girds every dimension of exploration in the destabilized, multiplied world of “Open Machine,” as the performers repeatedly ask, “Are you sure?” “How do you know?” “Can you check?” In a climate shot through with uncertainty—political, social, economic, technological—we may take as a model the unwavering curiosity that holds the microcosm of “Open Machine” together. Uncertainty and curiosity are, after all, at the root of all play.

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski is a New York-based dancer, writer, and labor organizer. Her writing on dance has appeared in Dance Magazine, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York, Danspace Journal, AGMAzine, and the Merce Cunningham Trust, among others. Sarah performs with the Metropolitan Opera and the Merce Cunningham Trust and serves as a Governor of the Board of the American Guild of Musical Artists.

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