“A few years ago I saw a peculiar news story: a group of bank robbers robbed the bank by fooling surveillance cameras powered by artificial intelligence. These cameras were programmed to recognize human motions. Human gaits. But robbers did not walk like humans. Robbers rolled, robbers crawled, robbers moved strangely, and robbers outwitted the AI. They haven't outsmarted the AI, they out-weirded it.
This is how they moved.
And they robbed the bank. And nobody caught them. And they got away with twelve thousand euros.”
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Gaitless (a.k.a. The Field) is an interactive dance space exploring anti-surveillance and anti-AI tactics as choreographic concepts.
The idea came from a strange news story: a group of bank robbers allegedly outwitted AI-powered security cameras by rolling instead of walking – bypassing motion detection systems trained to recognize human gait. It was a subversive act of evasion, but also, in an unexpected way, a dance performance. The robbers were accidental dancers. Their improvised movements exposed the flaws in AI perception.
The paradox of Gaitless is that participants, in proving they are in the eyes of AI not human, prove they in fact are human – strange and creative. The act of subverting machine perception becomes a choreographic principle.
Drawing from historical precedents like the Dazzle camouflage of WWI, Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle, and our previous project Tactical Poetics – as well as the evasive tactics of Serbian anti-Ottoman outlaws and Yugoslav antifascist partisans – Gaitless extends the lineage of aesthetics born out of strategy and tactics.
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Concept and Direction: Uroš Krčadinac & Marko Milić × MIREVI. Creative Development and Support: Ivana Družetić-Vogel, Patrick Kruse, Ben Fischer. Dance: Milica Urić, Marko Milić, Uroš Krčadinac, Predrag Mladenović, Anke Plaßmann, Nenad Jelesijević. Multimedia Software Development: Ben Fischer. Music: Kӣr. Video and photography: Leon Loesch. Created in the framework of MODINA project. MODINA is co-financed by the Creative Europe program of the European Union. ■
