Abstract
Our Lemon Grove is a responsive audiovisual installation exploring how human, non-human, and computational systems co-compose collective spaces of vulnerability, care, and agency. Originally developed as a feminist hybrid performance community during COVID, the project produced an archive of fem performers’ videos inspired by Pina Bausch’s choreographic language of vulnerability, brutality, and emptiness—engaging sensations of sourness, the act of waiting, and the experience of being together yet apart. In its current development, Our Lemon Grove employs a simple AI trained on the 2020 archive. As the acidity of real lemons within the installation fluctuates, the AI edits and recomposes footage in real time, generating an evolving environment where biological, emotional, and computational processes are entangled. The AI is positioned not as a neutral tool but as an active participant, sensing environmental change and enacting a collective choreography. By embedding natural feedback loops within computational structures, the installation reconceives the archive as a living network—an ecosystem that learns, decays, and regenerates. In November 2025, Tzavara and Ward collaborated at dotwip space in Athens, Greece, to develop the first prototype combining lemons, a video performance dataset, and an algorithmic system. They investigate how ecofeminist and re-humanist approaches to AI, embodied performance, and peer-to-peer network aesthetics can critique extractive technological infrastructures while proposing new forms of intra-action and co-creation. This presentation outlines conceptual and technical developments from the residency, situating the project within contemporary debates on art and algorithmic ecologies, and opening discussion on its future implementation.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Performance archive, Feminist critical media, Hybrid ecologies, AI and affect
