speaker
Sydney Skybetter is a sought-after and highly caffeinated speaker. Drawing on his expertise as a choreographer, Skybetter argues for the primacy of dance and embodied knowledge to understand emerging phenomena in the fields of design, technology, and surveillance.
Clock, Fall: Choreorobotics and Near Futures of Choreographic Practice
“Robots, like space stations, like art, are culturally situated objects that perform the aesthetic, by which I mean, ideological, priorities of their makers. The risk as I see it, echoing Octavia Butler and bell hooks, is that if we aren’t mindful of how hegemonic juices flow through these systems, we’ll wind up with imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy in space.” // Talk commissioned by The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.
I hOpe This Keynote Finds You Well
“We founded the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces to use artistic practices to further our understanding of how robots, artificial intelligences and surveillance systems affect our bodies.” // Featured Keynote, Presented by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
the choreography of the internet of things
“What can choreography tell us about how we interact with objects connected to the Internet of Things?” // TEDxProvidence
DARK ELEGIES
The Choreographics of Surveillant Systems and National Defense
“Skybetter sketches a vision of the evolution of contemporary surveillance technologies undergirded by dance theory and choreographic method.” // Lecture presented by Mozilla.
“sydney is as intensely funny as he is knowledgeable… He doesn't tokenize dance within tech. He centers on the body, on the interpretation of movements, and how choreography can bring an explicitly feminist, anti-racist lens to the development of emerging technology.”
— Kamal Sinclair, Executive Director, Guild of Future Architects