Algorithmic Dramaturgies

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Algorithmic Dramaturgies: Choreographic Interventions in Computational Culture

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

We invite proposals for a PhD project exploring algorithmic dramaturgies: the temporal, affective, and relational logics through which algorithmic systems participate in the composition of attention, action, and agency in digital culture.   

This research will investigate how choreographic practices—understood expansively as ways of shaping movement, relation, and perception—can expose, subvert, or reimagine these logics. Rather than treating algorithms as neutral tools or dominant forces, this PhD positions choreography as a mode of critical engagement: a way of attuning to and troubling the dramaturgies embedded in code, data, and infrastructure.  

Core questions may include:  

• What forms of temporality, causality, or relationality do algorithmic systems inscribe, and exclude?  
• How might embodied and performative practices make felt—or otherwise complicate—the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of computational systems?  
• What alternative dramaturgies—of glitch, refusal, opacity, delay, or excess—can be proposed through algorithmic choreographies?  

Possible directions include (but are not limited to):  

• Choreographic scoring with generative models (text, image, motion, sound)  
• Performance works that unsettle representational techniques in biometric and affective sensing systems  
• Site-specific interventions into algorithmically mediated spaces (e.g., smart cities, surveillance infrastructures, recommendation feeds)  
• Temporal experiments with feedback, lag, anticipation, or inaction as dramaturgical strategies  
• Practice-based reconfiguration of training data, prompts, or protocols  

Methodological approach:  

We welcome practice-based, written, or hybrid proposals that combine experimental artistic inquiry with critical theory. Candidates may work with performance, choreography, installation, XR, creative coding, or participatory practices. The project may draw on feminist technoscience, critical algorithm studies, posthuman aesthetics, and philosophy of movement.  

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following Centre.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.