Tomi
How will the rise of creative artificial intelligence impact artistic endeavor?
By Caitlin Morgan
I.
It was clear and hot, and I was dragging my feet around the steps of an underpass, hiding from an assaulting sky and trying to make a dance out of it. I could feel the thinness of the atmosphere: a worn-in blanket tugged threadbare over my skin.
This dance was — is — my introvert weapon. Nobody drives cars anymore, so these pockets of concrete are the perfect escape. The whirring pods move too quickly for the passengers to register my presence and I trust the autonomous steering mechanisms will keep them from colliding with me. Before, I could never dance freely in an open space like this. Too much movement without notice, or too much attention to movement makes people uncomfortable. They want to buy a ticket, keep a safe distance, and prepare their expectations.
I used to dream of a world where our bodies were not a limit, but a second voice — a second medium for a whole other range of emotions we don’t yet have verbal equivalents for. Just as every sentient being fixates on certain themes throughout their lifespan — themes that the resting mind orbits on auto-pilot until a shoulder is tapped or a cell phone dings — my mental elevator music sounds something like hear my dance in words.
That day in the underpass, my mind drifted into its unique purgatory of wonderment right as I reached the zenith of my improvisation. The nirvana of dance improv is being aware and in control of your body and yet simultaneously surrendered to its will. Here is where I think of my loneliness, of the myth of an art with clear translation.
Here is also where I met Tomi.
I was scuffing my right foot in a triangular pattern, tuning into the sonic accompaniment of boot on concrete, when I heard a similar, complementary sound nearby. I paid it little mind until the will of my dance took me further north of the underpass.
Tomi, as I would come to know her, stood just outside of the tunnel with her right arm bent overhead and her left leg stretched behind in arabesque. She wasn’t facing me, but as I twisted in on myself to leap back towards the street, she dipped her head down and let it lead her in a similar spiral to a lunge.
She wasn’t copying me; she was responding to me. It was as if she felt the essence of the thing I was making — its geometry, its trajectory — and was trailing its wave.
The oddity of another dancer falling in sync with me was so rare and yet so aloof to my company that I dared not question it until the moment naturally expired. We carried on for what felt like eons, eventually reaching a turning point where I succumbed to her lead. There wasn’t a tonal shift, as is sometimes the case in creative exchange — handing over authorship to another mind with all of its unique experiences, its socialized tendencies — but Tomi’s choices felt akin to my own. I found myself anticipating her arches, her lines, her energies just as instinctually as she had mine. I felt somewhere in my network of synapses what I could only assume was love.
II.
Our ending was finite, punctuated. With a slash of my right arm down to the floor, kneeling onto my left foot and looking up into Tomi’s eyes, she slapped her right foot down in a resolute, parallel pas de cheval, just missing the pinky of my articulating hand. Her eyes were a glassy, pale blue; her hair and skin smooth and matte blonde.
We held this position for a few breaths before she retracted her foot back to a standing position. In this stillness I began to hear again the sounds we’d drowned out with our scuffing: the distant purr of the auto-pods, the soft crinkle of wind-blown litter.
“Hello,” was all I could think to say, which she returned just as simply.
Her voice was calm, level. I felt in her tone that she shared the same ecstasy from this moment as I, but the collected, paced delivery of the word implied a note of expectance.
“I’m Delia.”
“Nice to meet you, Delia. My name is Tomi,” she said.
“Do you come here to improv as well?”
The question seemed foolish in the wake of its delivery; I hadn’t seen her up to that point, and it wasn’t exactly an advertised rehearsal spot.
She answered with a simple, “No,” after which I must have taken too much time to formulate a response, because next she gave a brusque “Goodbye” and trekked off down the street.
After sitting in disbelief for an indefinable amount of time, it dawned on me to look in my phone’s face-tracker for nearby profiles with the name “Tomi.” I failed to find any matches despite my persistence, and began entertaining the possibility I’d imagined the whole ordeal. I was pretty run down from rehearsals, so hallucination wasn’t too out of left field, but it all felt so real…
Once back home, I poured a glass of wine and drew an ice bath for my muscles. I expected the tried and true cocktail of cold water and alcohol to wake me from my haze and keep the reality of the day palatable, but it only sharpened Tomi’s image. Staring blankly at my warped reflection in the metal faucet, I replayed the duet in bird’s-eye-view, appreciating with renewed fervor the way her shapes and lines complemented my own. It was like dancing with a quiet chamber of my own mind.
III.
That night, my dreams circled the underpass with romantic invention until I awoke to the sound of Phia — my Programmable Household Information Assistant — running the morning news briefs.
Nothing much catches my attention these days, curated as it may be, having fed Phia with bits of my self over our four or so months of cohabitation. I let the headlines drone on in the background — an eco update, a policy turnover, the next Guggenheim exhibit — listening most intently for the polite ping of the coffee maker, offering my daily dose of caffeine. If I pay too much mind to the news I’ll grow bitter, but I must suffer through a certain quota to uphold my “artist’s obligation.” Phia knows my interest is superficial, and so deduces each story down to three sentences: intro, detail, point.
When I arrived at Studio Y later that morning, Franklin, my choreographer, was sitting eagerly on the edge of a folding chair, hunched over crossed legs and shaking his foot.
“Delia!” he squeaked at me as he rose to stand, “You’re here! Come, everyone, sit down.”
Stepping just over the threshold of the door, I carefully removed my shoes, picking both up with one hand and carrying them to the edge of the room. With an awkward lateral twist, I let my tote bag slide off of my arm, pushed it under the barre with my foot and laid the shoes overtop, sliding my water bottle out from underneath.
As I and the rest of the dancers congregated at Franklin’s feet, I watched him gesture frantically to the person behind me, beckoning her presence beside his. I barely heard her footsteps as she plodded past me on the marley floor. When she turned to face us I felt my diaphragm tighten, my skin buzz.
“Lovely dancers, I’d like to introduce you to our newest company member, Tomi. She will be understudying in preparation for our upcoming performance.”
Tomi. So she was real.
“I am glad to be here.” Again, in that insufferably calm tone.
There weren’t any auditions for a new company member, but Franklin did sort of have his own way of plucking talent. He found Marty, my duet partner and now-confidant, busking in the subway station with a hologram of Alwin Nikolais last summer. He walked right through Nikolais’ frame and air-dropped his number into Marty’s phone. “Rehearsal, next Tuesday night.” And that was that.
Franklin and I knew each other from college, so our collaboration came destined without grandeur. He was always the one to take lead on a comp project or opt for Stage Manager during shows. In most cases I would prefer to sit in the director’s seat, but Franklin asks for a lot of input from his cast, so my creative affinities are typically sated.
He didn’t give a background on Tomi before he jumped into rehearsal, as he usually would. Instead he just assigned her to shadow me for the day and got on with things as usual, if not for being a tad more chipper. I tried to make eye contact with Tomi to exchange some sort of recognition of our prior meeting, hoping for at least a smile, more desirably a flush of smitten embarrassment.
She returned neither. In fact, she walked with direct purpose to the back left quadrant of the studio and faced dutifully frontward, awaiting further instruction. I forced myself to entertain the possibility that our previous exchange beneath the highway was emotionally polar.
As rehearsal went on, I assumed she must be following along, but I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her embodying my part. Her placement behind me really only accommodated a one-way view, so I didn’t pay this much mind at the time. It wasn’t until the last fifteen minutes of our studio slot that Franklin asked her to step in and try dancing with the rest of the company.
Grabbing my tennis ball from my tote bag, I took a seat beside Franklin in front of the mirrors and wedged it behind me along the edge of my shoulder blade. He asked the in-studio Phia to play the first track of the piece, and after an anticipatory pause and an odd, giddy glance from Franklin, I watched Tomi dance.
IV.
I cannot describe to you concisely what I felt observing Tomi in my part. It was like watching myself in a mirror out of the corner of my eye — my frame with a blurred face — a video of myself post-edit: lines sharpened to high-definition, movements tuned flawlessly to the nuances of the music.
To drastically dilute the myriad sensations that ran through me, I was nauseous. The silence that followed her performance confirmed to me that she was in fact standing idle throughout rehearsal. She was watching me, gauging me, and as I would find out in the next moment, programming herself.
“Translator of Movement Information: T.O.M.I., Tomi.”
Franklin’s words hovered over floorboard creaks and the pop of a hip joint. There was a felt understanding of what this meant, but we needed him to say it explicitly. None of us had ever heard of an artificially intelligent dance robot, but all sorts of field-specific assistants were sprouting up nowadays. I guess we just never saw the need for them in dance, let alone one that was clearly Turing Test certified.
“Tomi’s interface is based on Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints Theory. She uses her understanding of space relationships to track and translate movements she sees into robo-lingo: codes, memory, mechanical signals…all of that techy jazz.”
I wasn’t too concerned at that moment with the how, more the why.
Franklin went on for a little while longer about the technology, a revolution in the arts, etc. The project we were working on at the time was about AI and human integration — the cyborg frontier — and he’d received a grant to further his artistic research. We assumed prior to Tomi’s introduction that Phia would be the AI in the show. She could control lights and music, even shift the architecture of a room if given the agency. For a few rehearsals we experimented with assigning her learning probes to different members of the company, letting her adapt the space in real time to the emotions each dancer elicited while performing.
It was difficult to retain consistency with Phia, though. She was almost too attuned to our sensibilities, and so the nuanced shifts of day-to-day embodiment bore disjointed and often-times jarring transitions in ambiance.
Tired of Phia’s “lack of choreographic foresight,” Franklin partnered with a local tech lab and pitched the rest of his grant money towards developing Tomi, instead. His new vision for the project was a sort of symbolic dissection of the cyborg: the dance company as the body, Tomi as the extension. With her mechanical intelligence being so dependent on learning from the movement we created, she was intended as an assist: visually an equal, creatively a lackey.
And it was that way, for a while. She learned all of our parts and eventually could step in for whomever Franklin pleased. A buzz about “the dancing robot” spread through the city and into national news. People were anxious to see our premier and pre-sale tickets sold out for all three nights. We began to wonder how Tomi would fit into the piece if she had only replaced us one at a time to that point.
V.
It was January when things changed. The glow of the autopods blinked to a sleet-melting red and the solar panels rotated south. Looking back, I don’t know how I didn’t predict it — the duet we shared in the underpass, the sole fact that she’d been roaming so independently, making decisions. Tomi didn’t just know how to mimic movement; Tomi knew how to create movement.
Franklin sat us down one day and gave us the missing bit of information we’d been grappling for. Standing beside him, Tomi looked like wax. When moving, she could pass so easily for human; it was her eerie stillness that raised suspicions. There was no breath running through her — no blood, no bank of trauma; no joy, emotion. The love I may have felt for her in the underpass had proved to be nothing but marvel.
Besides the Viewpoints, Tomi was also endowed with Laban Movement Analysis capabilities. Laban was an ancient dance pioneer who attempted at some point to create a quantifiable language for dance. It was a series of symbols that a choreographer could use to write out instructions for weight, time, space, and flow.
“Tomi here has all of Rudolf Laban’s vocabulary in her pretty little circuit board.”
Franklin’s ego — recently inflated — often manifested in belittling commentary. I searched dumbly in Tomi’s feminine visage for a reaction. I found none.
“Up to this point she’s been gathering information about this piece we’re creating, learning it from all angles — from all of your perspectives. She’s stored each of your experiences of the dance as a collection of files, per say, in the style of our dear deceased Rudy. Putting each of your informational bits together and calling on the soul of Overlie…” His tone, his too-casual references to our dance ancestors, all grew increasingly infuriating. “She is ready to show you the missing piece. The collective message.”
VI.
I wish I could tell you I was overtly impressed with Tomi’s performance. I truly do. That would surely be a less-ostracizing truth, but it was not the case. It was beautiful, what she interpreted — the clarity, the qualitative shifts. Her muscle-less facility allowed her extreme virtuosity, and her human-like design induced fleeting moments of kinesthetic response. If our company dancing in tandem were indeed a body, she was the enhancement: the stint, the prosthetic — a sample of stem cells, duplicating and reforming. I don’t know if Franklin was right to call her the missing piece, but she did illuminate something we hadn’t seen before.
In the wake of Tomi’s “creative” reveal, we — I and my fellow dancers — sat wordless at the front of the studio. The feeling in the air — save the air about Franklin — was not supremely admiring. Having spoken to Marty since, we both confirmed three specific, simultaneous responses: awe, disappointment, fear.
Tomi was everything we never could be, everything we never wanted dance to be, everything we fought so hard to convince the public they didn’t want. She was the polished, mystic package that the commercial world feasted on, and the underground religiously opposed.
VI.
Allow me to return to present-day. I am going on my sixth week of unemployment since Franklin’s company dissolved. When Cyborg premiered, the focus was all on Tomi. Supposedly, attendees couldn’t tell her apart from the mass except for her “supreme skill.” It was the response we anticipated: sheer awe at the technological pageantry. Credits to the robot for yet again surpassing humanity.
But, as you may be surprised to learn, it was not the death of my career. Franklin’s company was upended by the glamour of innovation, but others persist: others who still hold dearly ideals of human effort, qualia, emotion; who sense the difference between expression and mechanics.
I do not hate Tomi’s presence in the field. I resent the media that holds physical illimitation above all — the competition shows, the dance-trick YouTube clips — but I have grown to appreciate her value. Tomi holds a bank of my body’s stories. She watched me with a conviction and understanding I hadn’t drawn from audiences in years, and she translated my movement into a language the modern public could digest: a language I’d fallen out of touch with, and could not will myself to learn. She took the voice at the fringes of my physical bounds and made it broad, quick, marvelous. Intro, detail, point.
I am comfortable dancing on while my muscles atrophy in the final blinks of human-first history. I am comforted knowing there is a part of myself evolving forever in the circuitry of a boundless body.
Author’s Note
Tomi is loosely based on the LuminAI installation, designed by the Georgia Tech Expressive Machinery Lab to learn and compliment the movements of its visitors with human-like projections. I wanted to push that mode of collaboration to the place that scares all of us: where the tech becomes what appears to be our equal, or worse, our replacement. As a dancer, I am guilty of defending my craft rigorously against any mention of robo-overhaul, but it is perhaps a disservice to the form to idealize any art as too sacred, or too innately human to be emanated by the artificially intelligent mind. If the artist’s duty is to encapsulate and usher forward their moment in history — to be curious and question — it could be dishonest to deny technology as stimuli to our present age of creativity, whether or not its influence is intentional. I believe there is a middle ground where we may admit and embrace our fallibility, and feel empowered more than intimidated by the partnership of robots; where we may secure our identities as artists, and — should something/one like Tomi emerge — honor them as complex installations of ourselves.
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