Wayne McGregor's Autobiography

Genetic code, AI and choreography merge in a work that re-imagines and remakes itself anew for every performance.

Throughout his career, Wayne McGregor has made choreography that interrogates life through the experience of the body in its multifaceted relationship with technology.

In 2017, McGregor turned his attention to the ‘body as archive’ with Autobiography (1.0), the first in a developing series of unique dance portraits inspired and determined by the sequencing of his own genetic code.

Layering choreographic imprints over personal memoir and in dialogue with a specially created algorithm that hijacks McGregor’s DNA data, Autobiography upends the traditional nature of dance-making as artificial intelligence and instinct converge in creative authorship.

In the latest iterations of the work, AISOMA – a new AI tool developed with Google Arts and Culture utilizing machine-learning trained on 100s of hours of McGregor’s choreographic archive – overwrites the configurations of its initial state to present fresh movement options to the performers, injecting unfamiliar and often startling content into the choreographic ecosystem. Life, writing itself anew.