An 8-minute 180° stereoscopic VR dance miniature

We, Brute Force features two dancers from the New Human Body Society around Charlotte Triebus — Misha Ostenrath and Kevin Beyer. It takes as its starting point brute force as a strategy describing the systematic trial-and-error use of force in both algorithms and warfare.

The work negotiates guilt and innocence as a suspended state between subjects and non-human agency in the age of AI. The choreography presents the human being in a tender act of saliva, fallibility, and falling, within an immersive staging featuring costumes by Flora Miranda.

A complementary large-screen version is intended for museum spaces and immersive art centres in Germany and international conferences and festivals.

At the centre stands a single word: ulklären

In his Georg-Büchner-Preis acceptance speech, Clemens J. Setz describes how Karl Krall — initiator of the so-called "Elberfeld horses" — retrospectively interprets a tapped signal from one of his horses as a request to explain the world, rather than treating the animal permanently as a testing apparatus.

From this motif, the piece derives its central ethical question: what translation work emerges when communication is organised as a shared, bilateral practice? The "We" in the title does not mark distance but co-responsibility — a "we" that recognises itself as part of the danger. It designates a relational condition in which cooperation and access, care and control, protection and violence arise in the same field.

Algorithmic · Military · Disciplinary

Krall's stable, the ballet studio, and contemporary AI training environments operate according to the same logic — translating behaviour into measurable responses, stabilising criteria, and in doing so inscribing presuppositions and power relations into their results. Kate Crawford traces this parallel precisely in Atlas of AI (2021).

Falling as shared practice and ethical figure

Two dancers lose stability together, catch one another, miss each other, carry each other, and fall again into imbalance. The movement material is organised as a combinatorial sequence — repetition, variation, and iteration as choreographic equivalents of the brute-force algorithm: no shortcut, no elegant solution, but the systematic working-through of all possibilities until a form emerges.

The equine-plausible movement language is developed through large language models and the ConlangCrafter pipeline (Alper et al. 2025), with Laban Notation serving as a methodological bridge between species registers.

Thermodynamic · Relational · Normative

Data in HCI is typically framed as resource, representation, or interface material. This work proposes a complementary figure: data as energy — a force that drives and exhausts, concentrates and dissipates, carries the momentum of prior inscriptions into new bodies and situations.

Drawing on Barad's concept of intra-action, the equine-plausible notation system reorganises movement the moment it enters the apparatus, and that reorganisation flows back into what can be rehearsed, corrected, evaluated. The choreographic decision — falling as shared, cooperative failure — is a counter-inscription that redirects accumulated normative energy toward an ethics of acknowledged vulnerability.

A pulse implies a living system that can be exhausted. Treating data as energy that drives us asks what it drives us toward, at what cost, and with what we might be driving back.

We, Brute Force — Full Credits