RECESS
RECESS is a monthly public performance series where both works-in-progress and established pieces can be shared in an intimate setting. Innovation. Experimentation. Deep dives. Creative reviews. It’s all welcome here! RECESS is a safe space for exploration and forging new artistic connections. We offer a public program, performance series, network, platform, and ongoing opportunity to engage performers, patrons, artists, and audience members in a night of performance and creative dialogue. RECESS continues to promote and celebrate the work of diverse artists, in solidarity, throughout 2025 and onward.
Movement As Query
Preform.IO x FuturePerfect
MONDAY, March 9th, 2026
7:30pm
Chez Bushwick branch of JBAF
304 Boerum Street #23
Brooklyn, NY 11206
Map Link Here
PROGRAM
Movement as Query (MaQ) is a choreographic intelligence system in which the body becomes a search engine for its own history. MaQ is an ongoing experiment that explores the potential of live movement as a mode for retrieving and transforming material from a choreographic archive. It reframes AI not as a tool for generating images or text, but as a system that must learn to listen to the body differently. As a platform that makes artificial intelligence visible, unstable, and accountable through dance, MaQ exposes the limits of machine perception while proposing a new paradigm: corporeal movement as knowledge, as archive, and as interface.
Using the extensive archive and corporeal vocabulary of Jonah Bokaer as source material, MaQ treats embodied motion as a living query—capable of summoning, recomposing, and transforming audiovisual memory. As a dancer moves in the present, the system responds by calling up related fragments from the past. In this exchange, the archive is activated through motion, revealing how the system recognizes, misreads, or reshapes the traces of the work it sees.
At RECESS, david allen, Aaron Juarez, and Jonah Bokaer will share their research process and demonstrate how live movement activates this living archive. This presentation will include working prototypes and an examination of the "thresholds" of the system—where it successfully recognizes movement and where it fails to see. Following the demonstration, audience members will have the opportunity to interact with MaQ first hand, followed by an open discussion on the future of movement as an interface.
COLLABORATORS
Aaron J. Juarez is a Mestizo (Native, Hispanic) artist-researcher whose practice bridges art and science. Moving across a wide spectrum of expressive and conceptual modes, he creates by synthesizing and remixing a diverse array of sources, resulting in a body of work that spans still imagery, video, 3D models, live coding, and academic publications. In testing the limits of digital structures, he opens space for sublime moments through the interplay of nature and technology speaking for themselves. His work in experimental art and astrophysics has been internationally recognized, and he continues to pursue projects that interrogate how meaning and value are constructed across science, art, and the humanities.
Isabel L. T. Burlingham has studied classical dance techniques since the age of six and now acts as a production manager for preform.IO. Isabel performed with the Princeton Ballet School, including productions of Coppelia, Sleeping Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland. For the last ten years, Isabel has focused on social dancing techniques, including both LA and NYC Salsa styles and Argentine Tango. For Isabel, dance is the most effective way to stay physically, socially, and mentally healthy — dance is her way of life.
david allen is a Hispanic-American digital culture worker whose art weaves threads of movement into experiential patterns using kinesthetic interfaces. With a combined background in AI research at Rensselaer’s Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab (CISL), and previously in video game development, allen’s work has been presented at AAAI, the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces at Brown, Dance Studies Association Conference at Northwestern, MIT Hacking Arts, Drexel University, Rutgers, and GameFest; and has been instantiated at the Tech Valley Center of Gravity, Illuminus Boston, Illuminus on Lawn D, and Kaatsbaan Culture Park.
Wayne Ashley is a New York–based producer and director working across performance, visual art, and digital media to develop new models for how art is created and experienced. He is the Founder and Executive Producer of FuturePerfect Studio, where he leads the development of mixed-reality works, game-engine–driven installations, and collaborations connecting artists and technologists. Ashley previously held senior curatorial and producing roles at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and has advised international arts and technology initiatives, including work with the Norwegian and Danish governments. His projects have been presented at festivals, museums, galleries, and new media venues worldwide. Recent works include Starve the Algorithm (with William Kentridge), Studio Visit (with Will Ryman), and Void Climber, a video game structured around ascent and collapse. He is currently developing City of Apparition, a six-chapter mixed-reality collaboration with Lin Shu-Kai, and Bad, Bad AI, in partnership with the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation.
CREDITS
MaQ Research & Application Development: Aaron J. Juarez, Isabel L.T. Burlingham, and david allen, preform.IO.
BBAI & MaQ Path Finding: Wayne Ashley, Founder & Executive Producer, futureperfect.studio.
Dance: Jonah Bokaer, Founding Director, Dancer, and Choreographer, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, jonahbokaer.net; and members of the RECESS audience on March 9th, 2026.
