Personally, I bristle at the STEM to STEAM metaphor, where art supplements science, technology, engineering and math. It’s an extractive mindset that makes artists distal, supplemental and disposable. All forms of expertise need to be held in equitable partnership. The outcome isn’t only a cross-pollination of ideas — it’s tangible intellectual property, new startups, employment opportunities, new art, commissioned work, internships and platforms for Brown students to present. It’s also a model of equitable interdisciplinary collaboration for others to reproduce and improve upon.

Q: What are you most excited to see come to fruition at this year’s conference?

Marking our 10th anniversary, we’re using the platform to ask what performance looks like in microgravity, in space and in the cultural architectures already being built for those futures. I’m thrilled about our planned “WALL-E” discussion. We’ve invited artists, theorists and roboticists to provide live commentary — part film analysis, part open-mic lecture. We’re presenting “COMMIT!” by Kate Ladenheim, where the artist executes hundreds of dramatic falls in an hour. The audience uses an app to vote on whether they believe the performer has truly committed, and an avatar replica reads the audience’s feedback aloud while the live performer responds in real time. But what I’m most excited about is the feeling: a shared sense that CRCI is a temporary sandbox to work toward coalitions, technologies and performances that don’t exist yet. The goal isn’t to solve anything. It’s to make space for new questions, new collaborators and new gestures that might someday make it into orbit — or into code.

Q: What are some conversations at the conference that you hope will spill over into the broader world?

Choreorobotics is a big one. Years ago, we brought together artists and technologists wrestling with what it means to choreograph with robots — industrial arms, animatronics, prosthetics, assistive devices. What started as panels at CRCI turned into our Choreorobotics 0101 class at Brown, and now versions are being taught elsewhere.

My research and CRCI’s programming increasingly focus on performance in microgravity and interstellar contexts. For example, what happens to performance when there’s no floor? What does resistance look like when friction disappears? These are vital questions, especially as many of the same companies that perfected the surveillance capitalist mode of online social media and computation now race to build space habitats, and therefore, space culture. We want artists, people with disabilities and choreographers influential in that conversation before the gestures are standardized and before space culture is concretized by others.

All of these concerns — choreorobotics, embodiment, AI, interstellar culture — are being braided into new courses at the Brown Arts Institute as well as CRCI’s Dances with Robots podcast. CRCI isn’t just a conference. It’s an ongoing public lab for how we move, build and survive in increasingly technologized and speculative worlds.

Q: What is your vision for the Brown Arts Institute moving forward?

It has never been more urgent and more vital for artists to sustain their right for creative and free expression. The BAI exists to steward and support this massive endeavor. We are here to produce audacious art that hasn’t existed before and couldn’t exist anywhere else. When students decide to come to Brown, it’s because they want to participate in the Open Curriculum. The kinds of students who flow through the BAI tend to be working across multiple departments and disciplines and doing work that simultaneously engages topics like disability studies, astrophysics and cyanotype photography. Those are the kinds of cross-disciplinary projects the BAI exists to support. Ultimately, we’re looking for students, faculty and artists who are able to compose such unlikely and unwieldy collisions as have never been articulated or imagined before.

Q: You first came to Brown in 2015 as an artist-in-residence. Why did you stay?

Brown’s Open Curriculum doesn’t just encourage experimentation — it makes it possible. Students chart their own intellectual paths, and the arts are structurally integrated into university academic life. Dance classes are treated with the same curricular seriousness as organic chemistry. That structural integration transforms how interdisciplinary work happens. It’s what allowed CRCI to take root here. My first major collaborators — Stefanie Tellex from computer science, and Kiri Miller from American studies — responded to cold emails. That doesn’t happen everywhere. Brown is full of people who are brilliant, generous and actually open to working across difference. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’ll stay.