Yue Yao & Yitong Wang
Retracing: An Archaeological Approach Through Body, Machine, and Generative Systems
ReTracing is a multi-agent embodied performance art that adopts an archaeological approach to examine how artificial intelligence shapes, constrains, and produces bodily movement. Drawing from science-fiction novels, the project extracts sentences that describe human–machine interaction. We use large language models (LLMs) to generate paired prompts—“what to do” and “what not to do”—for each excerpt. A diffusion-based text-to-video model transforms these prompts into choreographic guides for a human performer and motor commands for a quadruped robot. Both agents enact the actions on a mirrored floor, captured by multi-camera motion tracking and reconstructed into 3D point clouds and motion trails, forming a digital archive of motion traces. Through this process, ReTracing serves as a novel approach to real how generative systems encode socio-cultural biases through choreographed movements. Through an immersive interplay of AI, human, and robot, ReTracing confronts a critical question of our time: What does it mean to be human among AIs that also move, think, and leave traces behind?
Yue Yao is a researcher and creative technologist working at the intersection of robot learning, embodied AI, computer vision, and human–robot interaction. Her work focuses on multimodal systems that translate language, perception, and motion into embodied action across human and robotic agents. She is currently pursuing an M.P.A. in Data Science at Columbia University, with interests in robot learning, multimodal perception, and responsible AI. Her practice bridges technical experimentation, design research, and critical inquiry, using writing, data, and creative computation to make emerging technologies more intelligible, ethical, and socially sustainable.
Yitong Wang is a researcher and graduate student at Carneige Mellon University with a specialization in machine learning. She places a strong emphasis on safety, ethics, and the responsible deployment of AI technologies.