At the 2018 CODAME ART+TECH Festival — also known as #ARTOBOTS — artists Catie Cuan and Amy LaViers invited us to experience Time to Compile, a performance and interactive installation exploring the subtle, often invisible connections between humans and machines.
We live in a world where people exist side by side even when separated by 1000s of miles and a time when data of human individuals is constantly being captured, influencing later unanticipated situations with unknown agents. Today there are more devices than humans connected to the internet. “Time to Compile” is an embodied analog for this Internet of Things where audience members can make sense of this new “place” and this “time”.
Time to Compile becomes a poetic mirror for this interconnected reality — an embodied analog for the Internet of Things. It asks:
What was it like before? Before what? Before now?
Through movement, sound, and interaction, the work blurs the boundaries between human and robotic presence. Live and recorded elements weave together; soft materials meet the hard edges of automation. Audiences are invited not just to watch, but to sense and respond — to explore how technology mediates, complicates, and sometimes conceals our very sense of connection.
Created in collaboration between choreographer Catie Cuan and the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, directed by Professor Amy LaViers, Time to Compile reminds us that the line between human and machine isn’t fixed — it’s choreographed, moment by moment.
The work combines a staged performance, or “system,” with an interactive embodied artistic installation. The performance uses a mix of live and pre-recorded elements, incorporating soft materials to contrast with the hard-lined nature of robots and avatars. The installation provides a chance for festival-goers to engage with robotic technology and examine their own relationship with it. The work often uses techniques like obfuscating performers and blurring boundaries to mirror the complex ways technology connects to human experience.
