Sarah Fdili Alaoui is a Reader at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London and also a dancer and choreographer. She conducts research in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer science with a focus on dance, movement, and technology. Prior to her position in London, Sarah was Associate Professor in the ex)situ research group at LISN-Université Paris-Saclay. She supervised my postdoctoral work there from 2022 to 2024, and together we created the dance/music/AI work For Patricia. We talk about Sarah's background as a dancer and engineer, and how these areas coalesced into her current and future interdisciplinary work, which cover dance technology, research through design, responsible AI, decolonization of dance technology and research, and more.

This podcast episode is available everywhere you get your podcasts from and, additionally, available ad-free and in video form on Patreon.

• Sarah's professional website is saralaoui.com.
• She mentions IRCAM, l'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique, a public research centre dedicated to musical expression and scientific research. Located in Paris, it is one of the most important and well-known centres for research in music and technology.
• We talk here and there about For Patricia, the live work we co-created. (Note: Patreon members can see the full performance from last year's Sõltumatu Tantsu Festival in Tallinn, Estonia.)
• Sarah discusses the work of Léo Chedin (For Patricia collaborator and Ph.D. student at ex)situ / LISN-U. Paris-Saclay), and Liz (Santoro) and Pierre (Goddard), choreographers and collaborators.
• Liz and Pierre's company le principe d'incertitude creates contemporary dance works that often involve layers of technology and experimental, genre-defying performances. I worked with them on the piece "The Game of Life" to create the interactive elements that structured the piece. The four of us, Liz, Pierre, Sarah and I, published a paper about the development of the piece, based on my firsthand experience and interviews with the team. I also published a "Making of..." blog post about the design process.
• Coming full circle, Léo has worked with Liz and Pierre in their newest work, "This is unreal", developing AI tools that can learn and generate dance choreographies.

Finally: As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please also check out the companion "Music, Movement, Machines" newsletter at johnnyvenom.substack.com. If you would like to directly support my work, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter at patreon.com/johnnyvenom. And of course, please share this with others who you think might be interested!

In this episode, I connect with Alex Tibbitts, a.k.a. "The Bionic Harpist". A longtime Montrealer currently residing in Mexico City, Alex is a classically trained harpist whose practice over the last several years has evolved into contemporary electroacoustic and electronic music. Alex and I are longtime collaborators, with an ongoing research-creation project involving analysis of gesture in harp performance and the design of bespoke digital musical interfaces that attach to her harp, which she uses in her live performances. In our conversation, we recap the research we have done together and track Alex's evolution from classical to the avant-garde. We discuss some of the key collaborators that Alex is working with to bring her live performances and recorded music to life. Alex's debut solo album "Impressions" drops November 28th, and the single "Night of Violet" is out now.

• Find Alex online: Linktree
• "Night of Violet" (single): Streaming links (watch the video on YouTube!!!)

About our collaboration on the Bionic Harpist controllers:

• Project info
• In depth: Designing the Bionic Harpist

Alex's collaborators:

• Techno Para Dos (Raúl Villamil)
• David Jonathan Romero

For the inaugural episode, I converse with a good friend and former colleague from the ex)situ research group at the Université Paris-Saclay. Tove is an interdisciplinary researcher working across the fields of human-computer interaction, music and dance technology, and design research. In our conversation Tove gives an overview of her past and recent work, and delves into some of the theoretical underpinnings and future directions of her research that spans music, dance and computer science.

• We mention NIME, the international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression frequently (website)
• Although we missed talking about it in depth, Tove mentions the musical instrument she designed and built in her master's program at KTH. Here is an article about the instrument, and for the academically minded, there is also a published paper on it.
• Tove's Ph.D. research from working with the dance group performing modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan's works has been published in two different papers - the first around the co-design of scarves embedded with motion sensors, and the second on her process and collection of movement data that she then converted into physical artefacts - a series of ceramic pots computationally modelled from the data.
• Tove's Ph.D. research, and my own postdoctoral research took place in the ex)situ research group, which "explores the limits of human-computer interaction, specifically how extreme users interact with technology in extreme situations." We were both supervised by, and worked closely with researcher/choreographer Sarah Fdili Alaoui, who is now a professor at the Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London.
• We also mention IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) in Paris, an important centre for music technology research and where Tove will begin postdoctoral work soon.
• Finally, if you are interested to learn more about Tove's work and research, you can visit her LInkedIn page here.