Misha Ostenrath and Kevin Beyer move through an encounter with vulnerability, violence and the responsibilities of being human. Based on a poem by Charlotte Triebus, the work connects the story of Karl Krall and his horses with questions of intelligence and the treatment of other beings. Falling, additional fingers and saliva become concrete conditions of movement, altering balance, anatomy, contact and bodily control.

Across eight minutes, the two dancers perform for a seated recipient. This third position can be occupied by a human visitor, while the work also imagines a horse or another entity as its reader. The encounter opens a question about how movement can be understood across different forms of perception.

We, Brute Force is presented as a stereoscopic VR experience and as a projection for exhibition spaces. It forms the first part of Halt and Catch Fire. A companion graphic novel follows the research and choreographic decisions behind the work.

Spheres brings choreography into contact with robotics and questions of agency. Human bodies and spherical robots approach, follow and respond to one another, developing patterns of communication through movement and positioning.

The dancers work with a vocabulary of poses inspired by calibration gestures. The spheres respond through sensors and algorithms based on swarm behaviour. Their encounters explore how movement passes between different bodies, and how intimacy and communication emerge through interaction.

The work can be presented as a performance or an installation.

kin_ is an interactive dance performance for a smartphone or tablet. One to three digital dancers appear within the viewer’s surroundings. The audience can walk around them, approach or step back, and encounter the choreography from changing positions.

The avatars respond to proximity, distance, movement and wind impulses. These responses make the viewer’s physical actions part of the performance. The encounter brings intimacy and observation close together: approaching a body can create a sense of connection while also exposing how it is watched.

Brigitta Muntendorf’s binaural composition gives each avatar its own sound environment. Moving nearer to a figure brings its sound forward; moving away changes the balance between the different voices. Inès Alpha’s reactive digital costumes extend the choreography through surfaces and forms that respond to movement.

The title refers to kinship and to relationships between human and nonhuman beings. The underscore leaves room for different expressions of gender, including digital ones. Created by Charlotte Triebus with MIREVI at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, kin_ premiered in 2021 and opens the series continued in proxy.

proxy is an interactive dance performance in augmented reality. One to three avatars enter the viewer’s surroundings and can be approached through a smartphone or tablet. Their movements and responses bring the encounter into the physical space occupied by the audience.

The avatars respond to facial expression, approach, distance and the height of the device. The choreography adapts to the space around the viewer. Looking at the performance becomes an action within it, with the viewer’s position changing the relationship to the digital dancers.

The avatars share Charlotte Triebus’s appearance while carrying the movements of Esther Siddiquie, Aaron Samuel Davis and Yurika Sophie Yamamoto. Their different movement qualities continue beneath a shared digital skin. The opening transformation and a mirror scene make this combination visible, bringing the dancers’ identities into the encounter.

The work examines how one body can stand for another and how identity, authorship and cultural appropriation enter the construction of an avatar. It addresses identity theft and racism: who can appropriate another person’s appearance or movements, how racialised identities are represented or erased, and who retains agency over a digital body. Brigitta Muntendorf’s interactive binaural soundtrack accompanies these changing relationships. Developed with MIREVI, proxy follows kin_ and continues the series’ questions about agency, intimacy and the boundary between observation and surveillance.

The people in front of the installation become the subject of a live exchange between AI systems. A camera image is observed, labelled, described and reinterpreted. The original scene appears alongside the systems’ translations, making their differences and interruptions visible.

Developed from Precious Camouflage, OS brings its questions of interpretation and authorship into an exhibition setting. The installation can be configured with one large LED screen or five screens, responding to the scale and conditions of the space.

Charlotte Triebus speaks alongside Misha Ostenrath and Felicia Nilsson, bringing the research of Precious Camouflage into a live exchange between argument and movement. The performance examines how bodies become machine-readable categories, and what happens at the limits of those translations.

Questions of power, authorship, participation and responsibility emerge through the systems’ interpretations. The Code treats artistic research as a public practice in which the audience can consider its own role in the production and interpretation of images.

Developed through the research of Precious Camouflage, Multitudes works across five chapters with drawing, fragments and layered narratives. References from mythology, computing and dance are brought into relation through visual metaphor and the tensions between different ways of knowing.

The comic extends into augmented reality through document overlays, bodily and spatial elements, interactive reflections and animated loops. These layers carry the questions of the printed pages into movement, sound and the surrounding space.

Charlotte Triebus develops the concept, text and drawings in collaboration with the MIREVI team for the AR elements.

Cosmic Noise translates a first-contact protocol of 32 signals into an alphabet of movement. Two dancers and a live AI system explore how a sign can carry bodily and cultural knowledge, and how a gesture might address a receiver whose ways of understanding are unknown.

We, Brute Force opens Halt and Catch Fire through a choreographic investigation of vulnerability, violence and the possibility of understanding other beings. The VR work and its graphic companion provide an entry into this research.