The Machine Movement Lab is a practice-based research project that explores resonance as both a material phenomenon and a generative force in our relationships with robots by aesthetically harnessing the asymmetries between human and machine bodies. While dominant visions of social robots remain trapped in our reflection, our practice moves beyond the mirror to investigate how resonance emerges through becoming-with difference-in-relation. Our methodology opens up a playground for dancers to entangle with machine artifacts, bodily probing how they mutually extend each other to explore their relational potential. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action (2007), our practice foregrounds how agency is enacted through the dynamics of encounter, where subjects and objects co-constitute each other.

These resonant encounters unfold through transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010) entanglements where dancers extend themselves into robot costumes standing in for robots-in-the-making. Our concept of bodying-thinging traces the resonance pattern of more-than-human attunement where human and machine bodies “undo and redo each other” (Despret 2013). The resulting hybrid dynamics shape the robot’s design, machine learning, and our performance scores. Bodying-thinging embodies the transcorporeal resonance generated by this entanglement, enabling forms of embodied empathy unique to each encounter. We are bodying-thinging with the thinging-bodying of the artefact, bodily resonating with its relational qualities.

Our presentation explores the ontological shift that resonance mobilizes through four lenses of transcorporeal attunement: becoming-with, becoming-hybrid, becoming-tentacular, and becoming-world; and how they shaped our performances Dancing with the Nonhuman (2022-23) and Alloyed Bodies (2024). Audience members are invited to get entangled themselves and briefly explore the transcorporeal effects of bodying-thinging with our robot costume.