MEMO AKTEN + KATIE PEYTON HOFSTADTER

Through a striking blend of dance, poetry, music, generative visuals, and artificial intelligence, SUPERRADIANCE invites viewers to extend their bodily perception beyond the skin and into the living environment. The artists weave these elements together with code and simulations to create an immersive ritual space where technological mediation becomes a means of exploring embodied consciousness rather than escaping it.

The piece leverages the neurological phenomenon of embodied simulation—our brain’s tendency to unconsciously mirror the movements and experiences of others—such that unseen dancers embedded in animate environments transform forests, oceans, and deserts into extensions of our own bodies. This creates a visceral recognition that we are not separate from nature, but deeply entangled within it, challenging conventional boundaries between self and environment.

Combining poetry, dance, and insights from neuroscience woven together with code, simulations, and generative AI, the work evokes a visceral, intimate connection to the living planet. It’s one thing to intellectually know that we are deeply entangled within complex assemblages of life, interdependent physically, chemically, and biologically, across multiple scales of time and space. But how can we feel this connection in our own bodies?

Dance is one of our earliest biotechnologies. We dance to express ourselves, to connect to each other. Through ritual and ecstatic dance, we dance to experience union with the universe directly. We draw upon the cognitive phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation,’ where, as you observe another person moving, you feel their movement in your own body. SUPERRADIANCE leverages this phenomenon by embracing a superposition of epistemologies and holding space for complexity. The artists challenge the boundaries of self, biology, geology, and technology – contemplating the whole planet as a living cyber-organism which exists across space and time.

SUPERRADIANCE continues themes first introduced in the duo’s earlier work Boundaries, featured at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
“It’s one thing to intellectually understand that we are embedded in planetary systems,” say the artists. “But how do we feel that truth—and collectively honor it?”

Memo Akten & Katie Peyton Hofstadter are Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artists, researchers, and collaborators whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, consciousness, embodiment, and culture. Merging backgrounds in dance, writing, poetry, drawing, sculpture, computer science, artificial intelligence, computational art, and public practice, they create speculative simulations, data dramatizations, immer- sive installations, and narrative experiments that probe the human condition in an age of artificial intelligence and accelerating transformation.

Memo Akten, originally from Istanbul, Turkey, is an artist, musician, and researcher whose practice bridges machine learning,consciousness, perception, and spirituality. A pioneer in artistic explorations of Deep Neural Networks, he holds a PhD in this topic from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. His works have been exhibited worldwide, from the Shanghai Ming Contempo- rary Art Museum, to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, to the Grand Palais in Paris, the Venice Biennale, and he is also a recipient of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.

Katie Peyton Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work investigates the complex relationships between embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Her projects have been exhibited worldwide, and her writing appears in publications like Flash Art, BOMB, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She is co-founder of global public art campaigns such as the ARORA network and the Climate Clock in NYC.

Together, their collaborative research and practice explore how emerging technologies— particularly AI and data systems—interact with the embodied, emotional, and ecological dimensions of human experience.