MORE THAN HUMAN

A soft-cinema Lounge experience

Dive into this evolving exploration of dance, generative visuals, and more-than-human intelligence, inspired by James Bridle’s Ways of Being.

More Than Human is a collaborative dance and immersive digital media installation in development by Tom Dale Company and The Light Surgeons.

Bringing together choreography, generative visuals and spatial sound, this work explores how intelligence could be read as relational and ecological, something that emerges through connections between bodies, environments, ecosystems and technologies.

Inspired by James Bridle’s book “Ways Of Being”, the project explores how movement, sound, music and digital images can come together to form an interdisciplinary medium that can provide a unique window for the contemplation of our entanglement within living and emergent technological systems.

The resulting installation invites its audiences to recline beneath a suspended screen to experience themselves not as passive observers of these systems, but to contemplate their positions as participants within vast, complex ecologies and emerging technological intelligences.

This inversion of orientation between subject and viewer shifts their perception. The result is both sensorially rich and conceptually grounded. The work moves between intimacy and vastness without losing the human presence at its core.

The work is being created as a flexible installation that can be configured in several ways and at different scales to allow for flexible touring.

Drift into a new dimension

The body remains central throughout: expressive, physical and vulnerable.

Dance and digital art echo forms found at microscopic, ecological, and planetary scales, blurring distinctions between organisms, landscapes and infrastructures.

To create the film, in the studio performances are captured from above, transformed through projection and digital processes so that the choreography gradually dissolves into wider fields of pattern, structure and abstraction.

Alongside this, the installation is punctuated with archival film and perspectives that transport the audience across inner and outer landscapes and relationships.

WHERE WE ARE AT

The project began as EU Horizon-funded R&D, piloting open-source, interactive software and its potential for creative work within the ArtCast4D framework.

Our aim was to create a unified work from a shared artistic process. Dancers, composers, creative technologists and visual artists worked in dialogue to create a single responsive environment in which choreography and interactive systems continually shape one another.

We have shared work in progress at three locations, testing scale and audience experience:

The Place, London - initial sharing of R&D film work
Nottingham Contemporary - large scale, multi screen experiment
Grimsby Minster - small scale, single screen experiment

All demonstrated strong audience engagement with viewers choosing to remain immersed for extended periods.

Where are we going Next?

We are seeking partnerships and collaborations to enable further development of this work.

In future development phases, we will be exploring how further choreographic practice, the addition of original music compositions, sound design, a narrator, animated text and other visual effects will help to deepen the audio-visual narratives and experience.

We are in discussion with several composers with the aim of commissioning of an original immersive musical soundtrack for this work. We will be exploring ways to integrate and to weave a poetic narrative into the work by adding voice and animated captions for greater accessibility.

The work is inspired by James Bridle’s Ways of Being which is a powerful rethinking of intelligence, not as something exclusive to humans or machines but as something distributed across all living systems, plants, animals, fungi, ecosystems and algorithms. Bridal invites us to see intelligence as relational, emergent and ecological. We wanted to explore these ideas through dance, music and moving image