Clock, Fall: A Performative Lecture on Choreorobotics

“Clock, Fall” was written as a performative keynote and presented at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. The talk is about choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which Skybetter 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, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, “Dances with Robots”. Topics covered ranges from Boston Dynamics robots, Tesla’s “Party Mode” and Optimus robots, parasitic aesthetic theory, the movie M3GAN, Artificial Intelligence, and a little bit of Beyoncé.