Ritual, Dance, Ethics

Malé Luján Escalante
Luke Robert Moffat
Lizzie Harrison, Art & Design, UWE
Viv Kuh, Responsible Innovation, University of Bristol

Dancing with the Troubles

Dancing with the Trouble is a call to rehearse with our bodies rituals for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions — to nurture a mindset of collaborative creativity and radical care. Beyond the duties of data management, privacy, justice, sustainability and diversity, we aim to support capacities to respond to uncertainty with music, movement and the creation of Radical Emancipatory Values.

The ritual started online, in the midst of the pandemic, framed by little Zoom boxes. Mildly exhausted from endless virtual conferences on ethics of AI, we decided to explore ways of embodying ethics, instead of just talking about it. In collaboration with street dancers, aikido masters, HIIT trainers and choreographers, we created a series of 12 values with accompanying movements that could be danced on screen.

Inspired by Indigenous AI Protocols, Donna Haraway and ritual design, together we celebrate rituals embracing the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable to inspire healthier AI.

Together we are building on this ritual to design a novel pedagogy for teaching responsible innovation and circumspect reflection in universities, industry and beyond.

Celebrations

We have celebrated the ritual online and in person in:

Human Show Podcast

We discuss how to use creative ways to form a space of exchange and how to exercise ethics. What is the end of me and the beginning of someone else? We also cover ethics for more-than-humans – if nature can produce technologies, then why would it not have its own ethics too? 

Publications

Read more about the ritual on our Pivot paper: 

Luján Escalante, M. A., Moffat, L., Harrison, L., & Kuh, V. (2021). Dancing with the Troubles of AI. Design Research Society available here

Care Pavilion, London Design Biennale