Christopher Knowlton
Dance
Chicago, IL
photo credit: Katie Graves
Christopher Knowlton, Ph.D., is a movement artist, research scientist, dancer and engineer who uses emerging technologies to investigate the nature of dance, choreography, health, cognition and audience engagement. While completing his degree in Bioengineering, Chris has acted as manager of the Rush University Medical Center Motion Analysis Laboratory and worked as a collaborative performer with numerous Chicago dancemakers. Affirming that art and science have always been intertwined, he believes that the body holds intrinsic information conveyed through movement, while our technologies, old and new, allow us to access that information and extend our bodies into new expressive possibilities.
Chris’s work has been featured in the 2012 Science Magazine’s Dance Your Ph.D. Contest, the 2013 TEDxWindyCity talks, the 2013 One State Together in the Arts conference, the 2013, 2015 and 2018 DANSCIENCE Festivals in Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney, Australia, the 2014 QUEER ILL & OKAY showcase in Chicago, the 2017 Chicago International Puppetry Festival in Chicago, the 2020 virtual Movement Computing (MOCO) conference, the 2019 live & 2021 virtual International Society for Biomechanics (ASB) conferences, the 2020 Night of Ideas: Alive! at the Field Museum in Chicago, the 2021 Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival and the 2021 Links Lab program, including collaborations with the Joffrey Ballet and STAGE Lab of UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Chris has also taught workshops throughout the world on invisibility, virtuality and queer performance with ATOM-r (Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Realities), a self-developed workshop on bodystorming practices and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programs with the Rush Motion Lab locally in Chicago. Chris is additionally a published research scientist in the fields of orthopedic biomechanics and interactive system design for performance.
During his residency at Ragdale, Chris will expand the architecture of his immersive augmented reality work Extended Play developed during his Chicago Dancemakers Forum 2020 Lab Artist year. Extended Play is an augmented reality dance work for the rotating surface of a playing vinyl record. A custom-designed mobile application for smartphones applies image recognition to the center label of a vinyl record to overlay animated avatars and scenes through the phone’s camera. Paying homage to music box ballerinas and zoetrope animations, this work tries to look at what a record of dance is and can be, mixing old and new tech, to look at ideas of nostalgia, futurism, isolation, connection and the way queer people experience digital spaces. This work builds the foundation for viewing and reviewing dance and choreography in three-dimensional space with augmented reality.