
- Friday 15th –
- Sunday 17th November
Digital Body Festival, founded by Alexander Whitley Dance Company and creatively produced by Mediale, celebrates developments in interactive and immersive technologies, which enable wildly new forms of physical experience, exploding the possible forms the moving body can take and opening up exciting possibilities for artists and audiences.
Set across a series of spaces within one of East London’s most dynamic cultural and community hubs, the festival will feature exhibition spaces, performances, workshops and live conversations.
Reaching across multiple art forms, including dance, music, fashion and architecture, a new frontier of creative expression has emerged, which demands a radically different kind of stage.
Digital Body Festival will provide the platform for world-class artists, thinkers and emerging talent to showcase work across multiple digital formats that invites the public to move and explore physical creativity in all its forms. Drawing many amazing examples of this work together in one place, it will reveal an exciting new frontier of physicality and bodily expression.
“New interactive and immersive technologies have the power to speak directly to our embodied and spatially situated experience of the world, engaging the primal and universal language of movement as a basis for storytelling and meaning making. I’m fascinated by what this opens up for movement-based creativity and audiences’ direct, physical engagement in ideas being explored.”
An open space of creativity inviting visitors to move, interact and playfully reflect on their experience of embodiment, the Festival’s central Futures in Motion interactive exhibition brings together artworks including Vast Body by Vincent Morisset & Caroline Robert, a playful and visually arresting collaborative experiment on movement, where a myriad of alter digital egos continuously try to replicate the movements of the person facing it. Interpreting your behaviour, the artwork’s software distils this continually changing input into a projection of a body that moves fluidly with yours, yet fluctuates continuously between different bodies and identities. The work draws on timely questions of identity, empathy and our relationship with other-than-human intelligences.
Incantation by Sian Fan, is a digital performance combining dance, motion capture and video-gaming to explore liminal states, magic and myth in the digital age, and the commodification of the Asiatic body. Creeping into the den of a part-plant, part-human creature, the work interrogates how spiritual and ancient beliefs can coexist with technology, infusing lore and legend with video game aesthetics.

Five VR and AR works compliment the immersive installations, including Cameron Kostopoulos’s Body of Mine, an award-winning, full-body VR experience that lets you inhabit the body of another gender and discover stories from transgender individuals. Combining body, face, and eye tracking with personal interviews of transgender individuals, the experimental storytelling experience allows you to hear, discover, and experience stories of gender dysphoria and euphoria.
In the festival’s Digital Bodies Gallery, cutting edge works from multiple artistic viewpoints reveal how moving bodies are constructed and represented through digital technologies and artificial intelligence. The programme includes two brand works, commissioned by the Festival, which will premiere throughout the weekend: Dance We Do and Living with my Digital Twin.
Dance We Do from Olivia Ema & Lex Fefegha, inspired by Ntozake Shange’s book on Black Dance, is an Afro-surrealist dance film. Set in a distant reality where communication occurs through fluid, water-like body movements, the film takes inspiration from the Ekombi traditional dance of Nigeria’s Efik people. Living with my Digital Twin by Jason Yip and Sari Mizoe draws inspiration from the Japanese dance phenomenon, Parapara. It explores the influence of technology on self-presentation, highlighting the duality of subcultures and the lived experience of constantly balancing different identities.
In addition to the new commissions, five further works will be presented in the Digital Bodies Gallery, including Jake Elwes’ ongoing project, Zizi in Motion: A Deepfake Drag Utopia, a silent video series consisting of life-size deepfakes of a range of London drag performers, which explore how queer communities can subvert deepfake technology, using it in an ethical and consensual way to celebrate queer bodies. The Portal’s Keeper meanwhile follows the journey of LaJuné McMillian‘s inner child, diving into an alternate reality through meditation and prayer. Particles radiate from their young avatar – an abstract representation of the energy we access and emit when we are able to move through the world freely.
Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter bring their extraordinary Superradiance to the festival, in a co-presentation with the BFI London Film Festival at BFI IMAX. This multiscreen video and sound installation invites the viewer to extend their bodily perception beyond the skin and into the living environment. Integrating artificial intelligence with dance and insights from neuroscience, the project challenges us to not only understand but also feel our profound relationship with the planet. By leveraging the cognitive phenomenon of embodied simulation—where the brain of an observer mirrors the movements of others—Superradiance creates an immersive space where participants can feel the movements of the animate Earth. This mirrors the rhythms of nature, inviting visitors to extend their bodily awareness into forests, oceans, and beyond, reminding us that the living environment is not separate from us but an integral part of who we are.
Performing Technologies brings together world class dancers, musicians and DJs, with cutting edge technology to showcase the latest developments in interactive performance art.
Boundless Body by Elizabeth Arifien is a multi-layered, sensory dance performance that will take audiences into a transcendental space, unifying dance, costume, technology and music. Another live performance, Cosmogony, by Cie Gilles Jobin features three dancers who are motion captured live at Gilles Jobin Company’s studio in Geneva and screened in real time for a worldwide audience; whilst Colette Sadler’s ARK1 is a multimedia performance that explores the precarious futures of human culture amid the life-altering interventions of artificial intelligence and ecological crisis, where human life is already a distant memory.
As part of a unique collaboration between Digital Body Festival and Tanz Karlsruhe, Germany, Alexander Whitley Dance Company’s Otmo Live connects dancers in each location using the Goldsmiths Mocap Streamer technology. This experimental distributed performance explores the intersection of emerging spatial technologies and traditional movement practices. Placing two dancers in different locations, the piece brings them together to perform a duet within a shared virtual environment.