Drawing Lines is an interdisciplinary live performance exploring the relationship between the moving body, sound, and technology.

The title works on two levels. Literally, the work is about drawing, in which the performer’s movement is captured in real time through motion tracking and rendered on screen as trails of dots and lines, transforming the body into a living drawing tool. Each mark is a residue of a moment, fleeting, unrepeatable, and shaped entirely by kinaesthetic impulse.

But Drawing Lines also speaks to thresholds. In a period where technology and automation is increasingly mediates how we inhabit our bodies and spaces, the project asks where we draw the line: between human expression and machine representation, between authentic movement and performed novelty. Rather than chasing the visual spectacle of new tools, the work positions technology as an enabler that surfaces stimuli already latent within the body.

Drawing Lines is a dialogue. A dancer and violinist engage in live collaborative improvisation, each responding to the other in real time, alongside Somax2, an AI listening and improvisation software that folds quietly into the exchange. Rather than observing everything, Somax2 deliberately restricts its attention to three specific features of the dancer’s body at a time, directing focus toward what remains: the quality, texture, and intention of movement. These visual traces and the AI’s subtle sonic responses feed back into the performance as new source material, enriching the creative exchange without overriding it.

Inspired by Rudolf Laban’s movement philosophy, Drawing Lines treats the body as the primary material and technology as a collaborator that listens rather than leads, presented through careful, considered constraint.

Drawing Lines was first showcased at the Immersive Arts Symposium at the Royal College of Art and went on to eight live public performances. After each show, audiences were invited to wear and interact with the technology first-hand, and an open discussion explored the work’s impact and the questions it raised about technology, the body, and AI as a creative collaborator.

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The team

Drawing Lines is a collaborative project between Freddie Hong, Giacomo Pini, Sue In Kang and Ali Mohammed, bringing together artists and academics from visual art, music, and Dance.

The project has been developed with support from the RCA VizLab Fund, assisted by creative technologists Alex Xi and Rían Stephens.

Photographs and Video by Vivaan Thongram