Kate Ladenheim
Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, educator, and creative technologist, with work that spans interactive installations, media design, performance, and robotics. They research bodies in motion, and how those bodies impact and are impacted by systems of social and technological pressure.
Ladenheim is a 2024 recipient of the Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Faculty Research Award. They were previously Artist in Residence in creative practice at the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance, a faculty role at the University of Maryland. Ladenheim holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design, where they were also a postgraduate fellow. She conducted research in motion interfaces for robotics design at U.C.L.A., and was the 2019-2020 Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance Lab at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Ladenheim's artistic projects have been presented internationally, including at The Invisible Dog, National Sawdust, Media Art Xploration, DancePlace (DC), Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, HERE Arts Center, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and The Performance Arcade (New Zealand). They were a member of the 2024 MAXmachina Lab cohort, as well as an Artist in Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab. Their work has been celebrated in Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.”
Babyface is a dance performance, a study in robotics engineering, and an interactive installation for audience-participants. The work invites audience members to activate a pair of large scale robotic wings with their breath and motion. The wings augment each audience members’ body, simultaneously serving as a magical, otherworldly spectacle and a physical metaphor for the outsize expectations placed on feminine bodies via technological design and social pressure.
The wings simultaneously create an effect of grandeur and awe, and a rigid, limiting characterization that becomes burdensome over the course of the performance. The performer is a revered spectacle because of this affect, but also cannot be different than her container; this tension between aspiration and limitation fuels this work.
Ladenheim and Lab members responded to an unfortunate circularity with deep historical roots. Technologies (from corsets to social media) pressure women to look and perform beautifully, effortlessly and non-threateningly, feeding a culture that expects less of women who conform while simultaneously punishing those who do not. This translates into newly created technologies (i.e. Instagram algorithms that prioritize and highlight promoters that perpetuate these stereotypes, the voice of Siri or Alexa, and Sophia the Robot) that inherit those same patriarchal prejudices. This collaboration uses technology creation and embodied practice in tandem to exploit these prejudices and reveal the emotional impact of this harmful circularity.