What happens when an artist takes 27 years of experience with digital technology and turns radically toward the body? Cross-disciplinary designer and artist Luna Maurer has done exactly that. The result is Dance Out of Pattern.
In this lecture and live performance, Luna looks back over nearly three decades of technological development and their effects on her practice. She touches on her early manifesto Conditional Design and the later Designing Friction, a call for friction in digital culture. This thinking led her to a radical turn toward dancing, and toward the question of what makes us human.
Her research is an attempt to dance with the machine – an AI model – and investigate whether technology can spark human qualities and co-create new narratives. Where technology tends to bind us to habits and patterns we can hardly escape, her work proposes using the machine to break those very patterns, and ultimately to get closer to oneself.
After her introduction, Luna dances live on stage with her AI model: a system that interprets her movements, responds to her, and challenges her through language, enabling a mutual dialogue that the audience can follow in real time. Dance Out of Pattern was developed during the 2025–2026 Fellowship programme of the Netherlands Film Festival.