2yla’s Hand is an experiment in shared agency across bodies and time. Using computer vision, the system records a dancer’s hand for 12 seconds across six rounds. After each round, it generates a new on-screen hand whose movement is a composite of every round recorded so far. For the performance, contemporary choreographer and dancer Hannah Schallert improvised with these accumulating composites. She had to respond not only to her own past movements, but also to how the algorithm interpreted and remixed them. Agency became relational. The machine and the dancer’s movements became intertwined as they shaped each other across time.

2yla’s Hand was a prototype for a larger project involving a full robotic arm and ten dancers performing one at a time. This test used a single dancer and focused on the machine-vision pipeline and early compositing algorithms. By working with dances derived from averaging, moving average envelopes, and phrase stitching, artist Jake Zaslav could feel how his body responded differently to each approach. This led to a hybrid method that stitches existing phrases and generates new movement between them, offering the system new avenues for shaping the dance.