Dr Diana Alina Serbanescu

Biography

With a double background in computer science and performing arts, I am passionate about fostering an artistic practice and research at the intersection of contemporary performance art, AI, and robotics. I am currently active as an academic researcher, lecturer, and transdisciplinary artist – choreographer/performer/artistic director.

In my performance work, I aim to create a new poetic language in which the power of the expressive body is enhanced by hybridization with the machine. Simultaneously, I am interested in bringing the body and its politics to the center of technological discourse as a strong signifier and stubborn challenger of mainstream socio-technical norms with their inherent power structures. My practice-led research and performances often involve the design of novel technological artifacts rooted in radical acts of poetic embodiment. In this context, I envision Human-Computer Interactions as choreographies of embodied interactions or dramaturgical scores for humans and machines.

Before my current position, I participated in the founding phase of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. There, I led the group focused on the Criticality of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems and promoted practice-led research on topics related to the ethics of AI.

I am also the Artistic Director of REPLICA Institute for Creative Anticipation, which I co-founded in 2017. REPLICA serves as a performing arts platform and laboratory for embodied experimentation, inviting creatives and scientists to collaborate on imagining alternative behavioral models for humans and machines, as well as prototyping new tools, cultures, and rituals. As the artistic director of REPLICA, I am keen on exploring feminist approaches to knowledge creation, the potential of poetic machines, and the continued validity of traditions in an era of artificial intelligence and digital colonization. My most recent projects with REPLICA include "The Shape of Things to Come" (2019–2020) and "Dancing at the Edge of the World" (2020–2022), funded by VolkswagenStiftung, and receiving support from the Weizenbaum Institute, Technical University Berlin, University of the Arts Berlin, Berlin Open Lab, and Hybrid Platform.

My latest dance piece, "She Brings the Rain," was commissioned by Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, and debuted at Tanz im August 2023.