Artists, Technologists and Arts Organizations Receive Funding and Support to Develop New Uses for Digital Technologies Across the Performing Arts
Sept. 25, 2024 - New York – The Doris Duke Foundation today announced the 20 pioneering artists, technologists, and arts organizations that will receive grants through the inaugural Performing Arts Technologies Lab, a first-of-its-kind accelerator for projects seeking to explore innovative uses of digital technology in the performing arts. Projects accepted into the Lab will receive funding for prototyping and feasibility testing, production facilities advice and knowledge- and network-building opportunities.
“These aren't just technology projects. They are ambitious proposals to radically innovate in the performing arts—how they are made, how we experience them and who they are for,” said Sam Gill, president and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation.
Selected projects tackle a wide range of opportunities in how the performing arts are produced, distributed, and consumed, including:
- exploring the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in creating, presenting, experiencing and preserving works across the performing arts, particularly among artists representing underserved populations and cultures;
- enabling artists and audience members with disabilities to further access, create and engage with art through the development of new digital tools;
- preserving inherently ephemeral works in the performing arts through new archiving technologies, fulfilling a need that is especially acute for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) artists; and
- pursuing field-wide solutions to pressing issues such as capital needs.
Doris Duke Foundation Arts Program Director Ashley Ferro-Murray said, “The more than 700 applications we received for this program sent us a clear message: performing artists are ready and excited to push the boundaries of what technology can do. They are asking critical questions about open-source approaches, accessibility and representation. Our goal is to help these innovators do what artists do best— bringing new, powerful experiences to audiences.”
In addition to funding, a critical part of the Lab experience will be technical advice and programming that help grantees build and benefit from peer-to-peer support networks across the field.
The initiative generated widespread enthusiasm, with an open call generating 745 applications from individual artists, universities, presenters, producers and arts organizations in 43 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Grant Recipients in the Inaugural Performing Arts Technology Lab
- Alaska Native Heritage Center, Anchorage, AK – Dance
Yuraq Project
The Yuraq Project seeks to use motion capture technology to develop 3D asset files that will be incorporated into XR programs on site at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Contemporary Alaska Native dance encompasses traditional practices used for millennia to pass down important cultural knowledge. This project seeks to explore the creative possibilities of visualizing and analyzing dance movements using motion capture processes that will allow for the creation of cutting-edge digital experiences. - Alley Theatre, Houston, TX – Theater
Alley Theatre Simulated Environment for Theatrical Staging (SETS)
Alley Theatre will develop Simulated Environment for Theatrical Staging (SETS). Using virtual and augmented reality, artistic and technical teams will experience the set and artistic elements in the context of the stage space well before fabrication, enabling earlier decisions that affect budget and safety. Embracing the power of virtual modalities provides an alternative, resource-friendly future for the theater industry. - Andrew Schneider, Brooklyn, NY – Theater
Tools for spatialized lighting and sound design for performance
Andrew Schneider proposes building and sharing tools that change how 3D elements such as volumetric lighting displays, Wave Field Synthesis arrays, and RF tracking systems are programmed for live performance, creating a reactive performance space that responds not only to the performers inside but to the audience as well. - Ballet Hispánico’s Instituto Coreográfico and Cornell Tech’s \ Art Initiative, New York, NY – Dance
Innovación Fellowship in Dance & Emergent Technology
Ballet Hispánico and Cornell Tech have designed an artist-centered fellowship of discovery and collaboration, empowering choreographers, dancers, technologists, and researchers to explore new modalities for activating Latine/Hispanic dance in New York City and beyond. The collaboration asks, “How do we use dance and emergent technologies to elevate the voices of people of color, especially Latine voices, in art and dance?” and “How do we employ immersive and algorithmic innovation in service of education and societal impact?” - ChromaDiverse, Inc., San Francisco, CA – Dance
Unlocking History: Enhancing CD SmartCapture™
ChromaDiverse, Inc., is revolutionizing the way underserved dance companies preserve and showcase their legacies online. Through the use of the innovative software solution CD SmartCapture™, companies can now quickly digitize performance program information, creating a comprehensive digital archive twenty times faster than when done manually. For the purposes of the Doris Duke Performing Arts Technologies Lab, ChromaDiverse is set to expand the capabilities of CD SmartCapture to make it applicable to other genres of the performing arts. - grisha coleman, Cambridge, MA – Dance
The Movement Undercommons: Technology as Resistance | Future Archives
The Movement Undercommons brings custom built, mobile, motion capture technology out of the lab and into the field to look at choreographies of labor. By centering vernacular movement, this project raises questions, which ways of life are “carried along” through expressions of the body. Which vernaculars persist? Which are vanishing? - Guillermo E. Brown, Los Angeles, CA – Multi-disciplinary
THE INSTRUMENT
Guillermo E. Brown’s upcoming project THE INSTRUMENT is an interdisciplinary system within a musical framework, focused on performative complexities and aesthetic considerations of jazz. The project continues Brown’s nearly three decades of work engaging with issues around drumming and new technology. THE INSTRUMENT builds on the hybridity of the drum set, envisioning a percussion instrument as a living installation producing audio and visuals in reaction to human gesture. THE INSTRUMENT becomes an intersectional vehicle inducing performer and audience to dream across boundaries, into the future. - HBArts Collective, Inc. (Hope Boykin and Albert Crawford), New York, NY – Multi-disciplinary
Creating and Seeing S.M.A.R.T: Spatial Movement Artistic Rendering Technology
HBArts Collective aims to develop virtual technology for choreographers, directors, and lighting designers to foster efficiency in the creation/pre-production process by developing a method of moving animated forms that can be illuminated within a virtual space, widening the door of previous systems. These editable polygons will aid in virtual collaboration, putting artistry at the forefront and giving time and energy back to the artist. - Junebug Productions and Well Endowed Philanthropy, New Orleans, LA, Los Angeles, CA, and Portland, OR – Theater
The Future is Us: ChatGPT for Black-led Arts Organizations
Junebug Productions and Well Endowed Philanthropy are partnering to explore how ChatGPT technology can transform the operations and creative programming of Junebug Productions, a Southern, Black-led performing arts organization. The project aims to streamline administrative tasks, enhance fundraising and communications, and support creative production, thereby increasing Junebug’s capacity to focus on powerful theatrical works. This collaboration will examine the ethical considerations of working with AI and create a replicable model for other arts organizations to responsibly integrate large language model AI technology, fostering innovation and inclusivity while maintaining integrity and solidarity with marginalized communities. - Kinetic Light, New York, NY – Multi-Disciplinary
Advancing Innovation in Performing Arts Access Technologies
Disability arts company Kinetic Light will advance research and development in the use of technology that supports deployable, user-centered, flexible, and powerful methods of access in the performing arts. Kinetic Light will further its exploration and experimentation in audio description, spatial audio, and haptic interfaces. The project will advance critical phases of development in the creation of technologies and approaches that will become a working infrastructure and series of practices from which we can create cutting-edge performance experiences. - jaamil olawale kosoko / kosoko performance studio, Brooklyn, NY / Philadelphia, PA – Multi-disciplinary
Mapping the Ephemeral Passage: Methods for Archiving Performance
kosoko performance studio will create an open-source, user-friendly archiving platform designed to help performing artists— particularly Black, queer, and Indigenous artists, whose work is almost always in-between, marginalized, and invisibilized—easily document and organize their creative output using customizable templates, serving as a platform for digital distribution and a historical record of artistic labor. - Marcus Roberts, Tallahassee, FL – Jazz
Remote Real-time Performance and the Future of Jazz
Remote Real-time Performance and the Future of Jazz seeks to use emerging technologies to remotely create, perform, record, and share jazz music. Complex latency issues will be addressed to enable audio-video recording of performances in real time with musicians in different geographic locations. This work will facilitate new interactive opportunities for artists and audiences as well as innovative strategies for young musicians and educators. Software and hardware accessibility issues for blind musicians and production staff will be addressed throughout. - Momentum Stage, Inc. with Nicole Perry, Pedram Nimreezi and Ed Talavera, Plantation, FL – Dance
Totentanz: Creative Performance Protection (aka T3)
Totentanz (aka T3) is a new use of pose estimation and facial recognition technologies to decrease AI theft and training that occurs without choreographer and dancer consent. Devised by Pedram Nimreezi, an AI engineer, and Nicole Perry, a dance and theater artist, Totentanz aims to increase ownership and creative agency of artists. - Open Circle Theatre. Inc., Rockville, MD – Theater
Bridging Worlds: Reimagining Live and Virtual Theatrical Experiences through The Grieving Project Musical
The Grieving Project (TGP) is a groundbreaking disability-centered musical that uses cutting-edge technologies to create radically accessible, comparable immersive live and virtual hybrid theatrical experiences. TGP reimagines theater by bridging physical and digital spaces for those who can't be physically present. The project explores immersive technologies, refines 3D environments, and develops new accessibility and artistic features, fostering an inclusive and interactive community for all audiences. - Scott Oshiro, Mountain View, CA – Jazz
Deciphering Broken Rhythms
Deciphering Broken Rhythms explores jazz through an Afrofuturistic lens, highlighting the shared properties among improvisation, quantum physics, and the cosmos. Drawing from the philosophies and approaches of artists such as Alice and John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Donald Harrison, this project will integrate emerging technologies such as quantum computing and immersive audio to create an Afrofuturistic jazz performance illustrating how jazz serves as a tool for liberation. - Sélébéyone, Altadena, CA – Jazz
The international avant-rap collective Sélébéyone will collaborate with the renowned electronic music center IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) to conceive, develop, and implement a series of workshops and research residencies in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City designed to explore a variety of cutting-edge applications for computer-assisted composition and real-time artificial intelligence. The workshops and residencies will aim to provide a wealth of new and easily accessible tools to underserved communities of musicians, working across a wide variety of artistic milieus. - brooke smiley & SOZO , Oakland, CA, Oklahoma, Missouri – Multi-disciplinary
EARTH.SPEAKS: Bridging Indigenous Wisdom and Modern Technology through Co-World Building
EARTH.SPEAKS is a groundbreaking multi-year project led by 𐓷𐓘𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 (Osage) artist brooke smiley and developed by SOZO that seeks to redefine our relationship with Indigeneity, technology, and the land. EARTH.SPEAKS invites Native and non-Native communities to work together to co-create physical and virtual earth markers: sustainable and functional outdoor structures based on ancient building technologies, which become dynamic virtual stages for site-reactive choreographic and spoken theatrical performances. - The Healing Project, New York, NY – Jazz
The Healing Project Digital Archive
The Healing Project’s Digital Archive will serve as a combination of storytelling archive, digital exhibition, living library, and online performance and gathering space. This dynamic new digital platform will have three interrelated components: a living digital archive that allows people all over the U.S. to record their stories of healing and collaborate to turn those stories into music; a co-ownership model for participating storytellers; and a robust social media content production strategy that activates the archive’s artistic assets toward freedom campaigns for incarcerated people and their families. - Toni Dove, New York, NY – Multi-disciplinary
Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze
In a mixed-reality interactive performance and installation driven by a hybrid AI, virtual characters see and react to multiple participants by tracking their movement with responsive visuals and sound. It’s a love story, and a conversation between two people connecting across time: the ghost of Hypatia, and a NASA engineer who in the future is building an off-world power station. A dreamlike experience, a visual and sonic poem, and a machine that tells stories, participants activate the piece and become embedded in another dimension.
- VisionIntoArt, Paola Prestini (Artistic Director/Composer) and Luke DuBois (Creative Technology Lead), Brooklyn, NY, Omaha, NE – Multi-disciplinary
Sensorium AI: Disability, Technology and Voice - co-designing creative tech to expand the creative expressions, perceptions, and possibilities of the human voice
Sensorium AI is an arts/tech/research project devising creative technology tools to offer artists and people with disabilities new possibilities for increased agency and nuanced expression in shaping their voices. The project is part of Sensorium Ex, an opera exploring intersections of disability, technology, and voice.
About the Doris Duke Foundation
The mission of the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) is to build a more creative, equitable and sustainable future by investing in artists and the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research, child well-being and greater mutual understanding among diverse communities. DDF focuses its support to the performing arts on contemporary dance, jazz and theater artists and the organizations that nurture, present and produce them.