Newport Art Museum announces acclaimed choreographer and Director of Brown Arts Institute, Sydney Skybetter, as a featured lecturer in their Winter Speaker Series 2025. The lecture, entitled Clock, Fall: A Brief History and Speculative Future of Dancing Murder Robots, will take place on February 15 from 2-4PM at 76 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI and online through Vimeo. Tickets are $25 for museum members, $30 for non-members, and can be purchased at https://newportartmuseum.org/events/winter-speaker-series-2025-sydney-skybetter.

Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion – human or otherwise – move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, “Dances with Robots.” In this presentation, Skybetter will cover topics ranging from Boston Dynamics robots, Tesla’s “Party Mode” and Optimus robots, parasitic aesthetic theory, the movie M3GAN, Artificial Intelligence, and a little bit of Beyoncé.

The lecture will be held in person at the Museum and virtually on Vimeo, and will be followed by audience Q&A and tea reception.

Lecture recording will be available to subscribers and ticket holders.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at the University of Cambridge, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Faculty Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.
www.skybetter.org

About Newport Art Museum
Founded in 1912 as the Art Association of Newport, the Newport Art Museum traces its roots back to a collective of ardent cultural supporters, including patron and sculptor, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, Maud Howe Elliott, and artist and educator, Helana Sturtevant. Their shared vision sought to champion the arts for public enjoyment and established the foundation for our artist-centric ethos.Our Museum’s Mission is to showcase artistic excellence both historical and contemporary, enrich the cultural landscape, and invite all to connect through the power of art. newportartmuseum.org
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  February 15, 2025

  February 15, 2025
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