Becoming

Becoming (2013/2025) is a live artificially intelligent installation in which an abstract body tries to master all the movements present in an iconic 1980s science-fiction film.

Becoming was created by Marc Downie in collaboration with Nick Rothwell. Commissioned by the Wellcome Collection in London, the artwork was part of the Thinking with the Body exhibition there, where it ran live from September 15 through October 27 2013.

The virtual agent of Becoming was used by choreographer Wayne McGregor in his London studio as an “eleventh dancer” whose role was to instigate new ideas for McGregor and his Random Dance company as they created a new work.

The piece has been rebuilt for retrospective exhibition at Somerset House in 2025 and is on show to the public until February 2026.

A live, artificially intelligent and interactive digital object, Becoming is both an artwork and a practical choreographic tool.

Inspired by the colours and motion of the 1982 film Blade Runner, the work is a development of McGregor’s Choreographic Language Agent, a responsive digital algorithm that was an innovative forerunner to his later work with AI such as AISOMA.

Becoming seeks to bridge the digital-physical divide by eliciting a kinaesthetic and real-time relationship between computer program and human dancer.

• http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/becom...
• https://cassiel.com/project/becoming/
• https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitio...