Exploring The Algo Rhythm Within: A Journey Through Performative and Architectural Research
- Eleni Danesi
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
Art and architecture often intersect in unexpected ways, creating spaces and experiences that challenge our perceptions. My current research project, The Algo Rhythm Within: Touch me where I don't exist, explores this intersection through a unique blend of performative art and architectural inquiry. This post shares insights from this ongoing journey, revealing how algorithms, rhythm, and spatial design come together to create new forms of expression.
The Concept Behind The Algo Rhythm Within
At the core of this research lies the idea that algorithms and Artificial Intelligence can generate rhythms not only in computational operations, but also in sound, space, and movement. The phrase Touch me where I don’t exist keeps returning as a provocation. It points to the paradox of engaging with something that has no material form, yet produces tangible effects. It asks how an algorithmic presence—intangible, non-locatable—can be felt physically through space, resonance, vibration, and collective movement.
I notice how our bodies anticipate patterns even before they appear, as if we sense the algorithmic pulse ahead of time. Maybe this is where the research is moving: understanding the subtle negotiations between human sensorial intelligence and non-human systems of rhythm that reorganize our perception.
At the heart of The AlgoRhythm Within lies a central question:
What happens when algorithmic patterns migrate beyond machines and begin to shape sound, movement, and spatial experience?
Artificial Intelligence does not only compute; it rhythmically organizes. In its operations—whether we call them computational processing, algorithmic patterning, or simply machine logic—AI generates temporal structures that we can hear, sense, and even embody, because they can activate emotional responses and resonance or dissonance.
This research proposes that these structures can be treated as rhythms:
rhythms of light
rhythms of attention
rhythms of decision-making
rhythms of sensory activation
rhythms of collective perception
The phrase Touch me where I don’t exist encapsulates this paradox. It addresses the encounter with something that cannot be physically located but can be physically felt.
An algorithm is not a body, yet it creates conditions that touch bodies. It alters spatial atmospheres, provokes movement, and reorganizes interpersonal dynamics.
In the studio, this is becoming increasingly evident. When a sound pulse is triggered by code, the dancers instinctively adjust their timing. When a projection shifts according to a probabilistic script, the body recalibrates orientation. When materials vibrate in response to data-driven frequencies, the boundary between human and non-human agency dissolves for a moment.
The AlgoRhythm Within examines these zones of entanglement. It explores how rhythms—whether biological, mechanical, digital, or emotional—interweave to form new affective materialities. It proposes a methodology where somatic intelligence encounters algorithmic and artificial logic, and where the intangible gains temporary tactile form through performance and collective presence.
In this evolving world, perhaps touch is no longer solely a matter of physical contact.
Perhaps touch becomes the ability to be affected by patterns that have no body—
yet vibrate through ours.
Performative Research: Movement Meets Space
In the contemporary landscape, where artificial intelligence permeates daily life and global imaginaries, questions of identity, perception, and relationality intensify. The AlgoRhythm Within positions itself as an embodied research framework examining these questions through the experiential, material, and somatic dimensions of artistic and performative making.
Rather than approaching AI as either a threat or a savior, the project situates it as a global event—a “current” or shared wave whose meaning is shaped by each body’s perceptual, emotional, and historical configuration.
This research takes place through collaborations with guest artists, such as visual artist Lefteris Kastrinakis, Athena Androulidaki, and Yoryos Styl, whose perspectives generate new “layers of reading” that expand the scope of the inquiry. The central focus is not the meta-human or hyper-human but what the research names the OtherHuman: the neglected, unarticulated, or disowned facets of selfhood that reveal themselves through encounters with otherness. Our unmet need to find the roots of who we are, what we can do with our humanness, face our death drive (Death: in Greek Thanatos), and tendency to stillness rather than conscious dynamic evolution (Creative Life/Love Force: Eros).
Architectural Implications: Designing for the Intangible
Traditional architecture often focuses on static forms and fixed functions. This research proposes a more fluid approach, where architecture becomes a medium for rhythm and interaction. The algorithmic processes generate spaces that are never fully fixed, always in flux.
This has practical implications for architectural design:
Adaptive structures: Materials or installations that change shape or configuration based on user interaction or spatial data.
Multi-sensory spaces: Environments that engage not only sight and touch but also rhythm and movement as core design elements.
Hybrid experiences: Spaces that combine physical material architectures with digital layers, creating immersive environments.
Somatic Architecture and Body prototyping is used here as a method to shape matter through bodily and spatial interactions. Throughout the process, the body responds to Sounds, Rhythms, spatial configurations, and material limitations or possibilities, to collect sensory data that will become new movement patterns and embodied material knowledge.
Affective Materiality and Embodied Research
Affective materiality refers to the felt, relational capacities of matter—its vibrations, textures, resistances, and symbolic potentials—and the ways these qualities modulate human perception and inner states. Contemporary materialist scholarship (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Manning, 2013) positions matter as inherently active, capable of shaping relational fields and cognitive-emotional responses.
Within the residency, materials such as stone, sand, fog, paper, and sound frequencies function not merely as media but as co-agents in the process of inquiry. The body does not interpret matter from a distance; it is shaped by it, attuned to it, and—through movement—modifies it. This aligns with phenomenological and performative methodologies (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Manning & Massumi, 2014), where knowledge emerges through kinesthetic articulation, sensory attunement, and relational responsiveness.
Another term that emerged through research and the embodied response to the phenomenon of the awareness of artificial intelligence as an everyday interactive reality is the sensory maintenance and preservation. As an internal self-regulation that does not allow the historicity of the senses and their emotional interconnectedness with the paths of memory and the temporality of the composition of the self to disappear from one moment to the next.
Simondon, Individuation, and the Transindividual
Simondon’s work provides a conceptual foundation for understanding how individuals and collectives emerge within this research environment. His theory of individuation (Simondon, 1958/1992) rejects the idea of the individual as a fixed or pre-given entity. Instead, the individual is a phase—a temporary stabilization emerging from tensions within a pre-individual field.
Physicality and Artificiality become two distinct and contradicting polarities and the merged middle where boundaries dissolve and the realization that our bodies are the creators of all noetic constructions, the architects of resonances in a field of Inner Pendulums.
Future work will explore integrating more complex data sources, such as biometric signals, to deepen the connection between human rhythm and architectural response, and the translation of Embodied Architectures into a new perceptive and interactive language that aims to restore emotional regulation.
There is also potential to collaborate with dancers, musicians, and technologists to expand the creative possibilities. If this project resonates with you on an artistic, philosophical, technological, scientific, or existential level, please feel free to contact us.
Comments