Computational choreographies: Dance gesture between semiotic transduction and Artificial Intelligence

Within the emerging ecosystem of practices that integrate dance and new technologies, the choreographic gesture joins a radically new regime of translation, in which the body is transformed into a diagrammatic form that can be algorithmically manipulated. The article examines how computational systems reconstruct dance by passing through intermediate semiotic languages that select, segment, and reorganize properties of movement. Through three case studies – algorithmic reconstruction of movement, music-to-dance generation, and natural language-to-dance generation – it analyses the transductive processes that make dance manipulable, recombinable, and generable. In this article, building on our analysis, we offer a semiotic perspective on the regimes of intelligibility associated with dance technology, highlighting their limitations and potential as creativity support tools.