Moving Photon Trailer

Moving Photon is an interactive installation/performance created by installation artist Friendred Peng that explores embodiment, social connection and remote presence during the age of the pandemic. This work translates physiological data from live EEG recordings to an installation and explores embodied approaches in computational synergized space.

In this piece, EEG data is streamed live to control the morphology of an installation during a dance performance. The perception of the machine by the participant is translated into movement, manipulating the viewers’ experience and creating a perceptive feedback loop of human-machine communication.

Visitors may also register for an interactive experience with the installation, where wearable devices will capture the movement of the body to orchestrate the motion of the installation.

There will be a virtual event during one of the evening performances during which participants will be able to interact remotely through a web browser and their mobile phones to explore a sense of presence through a virtual interface and experience collective social connection.

Exhibited at Ugly Duck, the Hub / 47/49 Tanner Street, London, UK, SE1 3PL

TICKETS

Installation exhibition ( Daytime )

TICKETS

Performance ( Evening )

Bookings

Participation in Moving Photon can be in 5 different ways, including a Phantom performance, interactive installation, interactive performance, interactive performance with EEG and a remote performance.

During the Phantom performance which will happen every morning, you will be experiencing an environment consisting of pre-recorded brain wave data from previous participants while they watch the dancer improvising. During the nights there will be performances you can register to attend. You can either choose to wear an EEG cap to watch the performance while the data is live streamed feeding into the installation directly or to be a spectator. The dancer will improvise according to the live manifestation of brainwave data. In the afternoon prior to the evening performances, you can book an interactive installation ticket where you can experience the installation using wearable sensors and data to directly control its movement.

*If you choose to participate for the EEG, you will be contacted by us prior to the performance with more detailed information.

*If you choose to participant participate remotely, a few things you might want to know before attending the performance:

• Instructions will be sent out to you, and you will be asked to download an app on your mobile device
• We will have a technical support team to help you to download and connect to our server to control the performance onsite
• You will need to attend the performance online half an hour before it starts

Performance dates

5th - 9th January 2022

Director: Friendred Peng

Choreographer Seirian J. Griffiths

Music & Sound Design: Danny Hynds

Web development: Friendred Peng, Narayan O'Hanlon, Jacob Heredia

EEG recording : Laura Rai, Hennie Lee

Photography: Friendred Peng, Arturas Bondarciukas

Camera & Cinematography: Aurelia Bergs, Jono Moore

Post Production: Friendred Peng

This work is supported by Jamie Ward, the ERC Neurolive project (funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No. 864420 - Neurolive]), The Royal Society, ReMap (Research in Media Arts and Play)

Collaboration with Oscar Murillo as part of the large exhibition Collective Osmosis, Das Minsk – Kunsthaus in Potsdam, Germany

The work develops from Murillo’s long running Frequencies project and explores generative AI through a vast archive of canvases created by students in schools around the world. A selection of these drawings was digitised and used to train a generative model, producing moving images in which marks and gestures from different countries continuously merge, dissolve and transform. The work imagines a fluid visual geography where fragments of local imagination intertwine, forming hybrid pictorial spaces beyond fixed borders.

Team: Studio Friendred, OSM Studio, Maite De Orbe, Georgia Guirguis, Maddie Brown and Cem Duz

Artwork credits: Oscar Murillo
Territorial Osmosis (Brazil, Colombia, Nepal, Philippines, Senegal, China, Indonesia, USA, India, Portugal, Israel, Kenya, Honduras, UK, Oman, South Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, Argentina, Ghana, Germany, Chile, Lebanon, Slovenia, Georgia, Iceland, Mexico, Turkey, Belgium, Zambia, Italy, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Japan, Morocco, Ukraine), 2025 Video animation, colour Duration: 8 min

A collaboration with Oscar Murillo on this project, exploring generative AI with a decade of archival collections of canvases from schools across the world. Honored to see this project exhibited at Taka Ishii Gallery, Kyoto, Japan.

Artwork credits:Oscar Murillo
Territorial Osmosis (Brazil, Colombia, Nepal, Philippines), 2025
Video animation, colour
Duration: 00:59:00
Resolution: 2880 × 1800

Installation image credit:Oscar Murillo, Anterior Chambers, Taka Ishii Gallery, Kyoto, Japan, 2025. Photo by Nobutada Omote, courtesy the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery.

I am full of emotions, 2025
Video animation, AI
Duration: 00:05:00
Resolution: 3840 × 3840

The immersive space morphs and alters with light and becomes solid, its pressure composing and decomposing the self-awareness of skin. The dancer’s body is extended and manipulated as a conscious entity, exceeding the physiological object. The constant feedback between the body's trajectory and interaction with the environment changes the nature of the object itself.

The modalities of the body are interpreted and utilized by various practitioners including, choreographers, artists, and architects through time. The definition of the body has been extended by the concepts of other disciplines, such as philosophy, where some define it as decided by the potential of its actions. Inspired by these philosophical ideas of the body, Skin-awareness, an interactive dance performance, was developed to explore and experiment with the body as a self-aware entity, embodying and interacting with artefacts and an immersive environment.

Credits:
Director: Friendred
Dancers: Ri Lindegren, Dulce Escobar, Faith Markovetz
Music producers: John Xie, Joy Lee

Special Thanks:
Atau Tanaka, Pete Weisman, Chris Ziegler, Cumhur Erkut, Kim Swisher, Dan Jackson, Luke Kautz, Goldsmiths University, MOCO committee, Arizona State University and all volunteers from MOCO conference.

This is a remote dance project that explores choreography and virtual space via motion capture and open-source toolkit. The toolkit streams movement data in realtime from dancers in multiple locations, allowing for collaborative dance across great distance. The research project bring dancers together in a virtual scene, where they are represented by avatars, which can be anthropomorphic or more abstract.

This project was funded by UKRI and led by Dr Dan Strutt at Goldsmiths, University of London, as a collaboration with Alexander Whitley Dance Company and Akram Khan Company.

A series of stills inspired from “machine empathy” to reflect its aesthetics, decisions, differences and ephemerality of the process.

Decision - Cloud

Decision - Mist

Decision - Stalactite

This work was originally commissioned for Empathy Loading, as part of the MA CCA Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art in partnership with Furtherfield