Occupied with Traffic
25min performance
Mediterranea 20 Young Artists Biennale ‘BORDERLESS!’, 2025
Borders between Nova Gorica (Slovenia) and Gorizia (Italy)
Still from performance, Paddington Hypha Studios, London 2024
A performance that explores movement undergoing AI-mediated classification. Centred around what appears to be the act of riding a bike, Occupied with Traffic invites audiences to observe and repeatedly identify this familiar human action. The process becomes an analogue echo of AI classification systems, rooted in surveillance contexts, that capture bodies and frame them with textual tags such as walking, sitting or eating spaghetti. How can an action be enclosed within one fixed label? Can this deterministic system find some softness in doubt and lower confidence scores? Walking with 99% confidence, or 85%, 57%, 34%, 7%.
While structured like a playful experiment, the performance looks at how classification may seem harmless in closed systems, but begins to falter and eventually crash when applied to the complexity and messiness of life. In Occupied with Traffic, the body invites in classification as a game, and rejects it as a cruel reality.
Stills from performance (slide to view) in Mediterranea 20 Young Artists Biennale, @ stathis doganis, 2025
Parallel to the performance, the work expands into a video installation in which the performer’s body is subjected to actual AI classification systems. A human-action-recognition model and an object-detection model continuously attempt to stabilise movement into recognisable categories, producing labels that shift, overlap, fail, or contradict one another. As the work moves through different presentation contexts ~ a gym, a jazz club, a basketball court, a church ~ the surrounding environment influences the logic of classification itself. The installation exposes how these systems do not simply recognise actions, but choreograph realities through context, probability, and reduction.
Extract from labelled compilation from 5 performances, 2024-2025
C R E D I T S
Concept | Tech Development | Performance: Irini Kalaitzidi
Music and Sound Design: Thomas Rosser
Camera and Technical Support: Stathis Doganis
Occupied with Traffic was first developed at ImpulsTanz ATLAS (Aug 2024) with the support of Onassis Stegi’s Outward Turn Program and Onassis AiR. As a context-specific work, it evolves with each setting where it gets presented:
~ A repurposed gym in London, Paddington Hypha Studios, Dec 2024
~ A jazz club in London, Cafe OTO and Vortex Jazz Club, Mar 2025
~ The bordered landscape of Nova Gorica and Gorizia, Kulturni don, Mediterranea 20 Young Artists Biennale, ‘BORDERLESS!’, May 2025
~ A repurposed catholic church, St James Church Goldsmiths, London, Jul 2025