On Saturday, April 5, the Cerchio 91 space in Lugano-Besso hosted an event organized by the Centro Generativo, titled The Body Calls for Unpredictability. Artists, writers, dancers, producers, directors, and image researchers—both still and moving—gathered to engage with the elusive, and for some infamous, AI. The meeting revolved around thematic keywords: unpredictability, fall, and exchange—stimuli that flowed from human to machine and back again. "Prompting" was the starting concept—how to establish a relationship with artificial intelligence through instructions, exploring the process and models to see what happens, whether in text, visuals, or sound. People moved about, others worked at computer stations, and some sat observing with curiosity. In one video loop, a little bunny endlessly hopped over water—a prompt for creative potential, mirrored in fluid movements on the solid floor.
Manuela Bernasconi led this first "training session," playing on contrasts between weight and lightness, stability and falling, with theatrical sways that hinted at storytelling. And always, change in instability—that change which, after all, is the thread of life: up and down, right and left, speed and slowness, small collapses and recoveries. In threes, alone, or in clusters of encounter and collision. Bodies shifted through vertical and horizontal phases, sometimes still, sometimes full or empty, exchanging physical and emotional states.
(...)
Psychotherapist Rita Pezzati shared insights from her work with people affected by dementia. When memory—and thus meaning—is lost, another kind of memory remains, one that is embodied and implicit, present from birth and activated involuntarily. Beyond words, the body remains, a physical self capable of capturing sudden moments of grace. Later, in response to the improvisational choreographies on falling, and drawing on Porges’ studies and polyvagal theory, she noted how humans seek certainty but cannot live without exploring the new. That exploration entails losing one's anchors—but this dynamic, this rhythm of balance, imbalance, and rebalancing, shapes our way of being in the world. Losing oneself only to find oneself again, like bodies in motion, like the ever-present risk of falling—a game we begin as children.
The final act brought bodies into real-time interaction with improvised words spoken into a microphone and live music. Meanwhile, images reprocessed through AI by Felix Bachmann were projected, creating an effect of abstracted de-localization. These were still the same bodies—and yet something else, or at least that’s what the machine wants us to believe. Thankfully, the event moved beyond that illusion, because, as Manuela Bernasconi concluded, what we’re really talking about is human relationships.
—Manuela Camponovo
