An interactive movement work that parodies and critiques the gig economy through collective dance.
Participants become “freelance workers” on a fictional platform called Task, using their phones to receive algorithmic movement and sound instructions. The piece blends choreography, sound, and satire to explore how small digital prompts orchestrate large-scale human behaviour.
Originally developed through residencies at Citizen Artist Incubator (Linz), Choreographic Coding Lab (Amsterdam), and Testing Grounds (Melbourne), the work has been refined over nearly a decade.
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Concept & Experience
Each participant wears a coloured geometric symbol (pink, blue or green × circle, square or triangle) and visits task.dance on their phone. When everyone is ready, all devices emit a synchronised “ping”, assigning a unique set of instructions.
Movement instructions
Shuffle to the other side of the space; pat your body with your phone; pretend to keep an air bubble afloat; point your phone at someone and follow them; and similar open ended prompts.Sound instructions
Clap, stomp, click or vocalise in rhythm with shapes shown on a large projected screen.
Nine concurrent instruction streams combine to form a collectively generated dance and sound composition, an emergent performance choreographed by an algorithm.
Overhead, a live-narrated voice-over guides the induction of “new task workers”. The narration begins with upbeat self-employment rhetoric: set your own schedule, be your own boss; before gradually darkening into an absurd reflection on surveillance, control and burnout. The result is playful, accessible, and quietly unsettling.
Artistic & Philosophical Context
art tasker sits at the intersection of dance, digital art, and social critique. It echoes the structure of app-based labour systems, such as gamified prompts, real-time feedback, and social rating, and re-situates them within an embodied, communal, and humorous context.
It encourages participants to reflect on:
How digital systems choreograph our movements, emotions and attention;
The tension between agency and automation;
The aesthetics of collective labour in the age of algorithms.
Next Steps
Over the coming twelve months I plan to expand the work:
Extend the experience to a 30-60 minute duration, with capacity for participants to step in and out of the experience as they choose
Improve accessibility to enable Deaf, vision impaired, and mobility impaired participants to engage with the work
Explore integrating props and/or livestream projected video
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Performance Premiere
February 2017
Amalia Theatre
Thessaloniki Greece
Role
Set Design
Video Art
Documentation
Collaborators
Tatou Dede (Concept/Director)
Anastasia Tzellou (Dramaturge)
Rodia Vomvolou (Actor)
Alexandra Rogovska (Dancer)
Minas Emmanouil (Composer)
Thomas Marias (Set Construction)
Athina Kyriakakou (Costume)
Alexandros Alexandrou (Lighting)
Tools and Technology
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Processing
After Effects
Premiere Pro
Media Encoder