Shomit
Barua
Collaborative Movement Study for Realtime AI and Human Improvisation
What is it like to co-create with AI in an iterative feedback loop, where the AI generates thematic visuals in response to the movements of humans who, in turn, improvise dance in response to the visuals generated by the AI?
2025 Mesa Arts Center, 22ft x 12ft
Built in TouchDesigner, this real-time stable diffusion experience treats the body as both input and interpreter. Instead of typing instructions into a prompt box—flattening intuition into syntax—the human prompts with movement. The system isolates the figure from its background and lets gestures, posture, and proximity become the prompt itself. Each motion folds into the generative stream: a hand sweep remaps color fields, a turn of the torso dissolves one morphology into another.
The result is not “AI art” as image generation but a relational aesthetics that emerges from visuo-somatic negotiation—between algorithmic inference and human movement. It replaces linguistic precision with the preverbal ambiguity of embodiment. The interface is no longer textual but proprioceptive; what is generated arises through relation instead of command. In this sense, the work reframes “prompt engineering” as an act of listening through motion, a choreography of mutual influence where body and model are collaborators composing in real time.
Running a hyper-compact diffusion model locally on a RTX 4070 gaming laptop, the system sidesteps the usual rendering queues, cloud pipelines and textual bottlenecks—traditional affordances that distance the human artist from the algorithmic expression. Custom scripting compresses inference time so that frames cascade as consequences of motion rather than static, prepackaged endpoints. 16fps image generation—a near impossibility for diffusion—is treated with some clever post-processing that translates into an uncanny responsiveness, a kind of visual breath that is synchronized with the body, preceding the thought of it.
This immediacy is not just technical bravado; it is philosophical. The real-time exchange collapses the distance that usually governs human-machine interaction and supersedes the wait time of the AI model to “understand.” No more typing the right words to coax an image into being. This dialogue happens at the level of impulse and reaction. The AI stops being an oracle to be queried and becomes an environment to be inhabited—a perpetually unfinished state that catches movement in the act of becoming dance.