02/20/2026
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 a 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 firsthand, followed by an open discussion on the future of movement should an interface.
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
& Members of the RECESS audience on March 9th, 2026.
Collaborators—
Aaron J. Juarez, preform.IO
Isabel L.T. Burlingham, preform.IO
david allen, preform.IO
Wayne Ashley, futureperfect.studio
