Nina Davies turns AI’s strange bodies into dance

Extra fingers can be made as props. A face can be choreographed to look slightly unreal. In Nina Davies’s Image Syncers, performers learn to embody the visual mistakes people associate with AI-generated bodies. The artist describes a project in which costumes, movement and sculptural objects make those peculiarities physically available to dancers.[2]

The 2025 film is currently part of the Frieze × ICA Artists’ Film Programme, streaming worldwide from 12 to 30 October. The ICA lists its running time as 11 minutes and 51 seconds. Its premise begins with a real online practice: TikTok users imitating generated videos.[1]

A fictional podcast gives the movement a purpose

The film’s narrative takes the form of an invented podcast, What’s Sizzlin’. A host interviews a journalist about a seed-bank break-in. In this fictional account, a group called Plot Corps reproduced the appearance of generated imagery to evade detection. The reported crime and its participants belong to the artwork’s imagined world.[4]

Speaking to Stir’s Robert Kuang, Davies distinguished the observed dances from the reasons she invents for performing them. She began with a script, then worked with individual performers on their characters and backstories. The movement becomes part of a shared fictional situation, with motives beyond copying a funny clip.[3]

That gives a familiar online joke a second life. An awkward gesture can be funny because it resembles a broken image. Put the same gesture inside a story and it can become an attempt to pass as something else. Choreography helps carry the difference.

The mistakes have to be built

In her Henry Moore Institute audio guide, Davies describes sculptural hand props with extra fingers, including a double-ended hand. Transparent bags reveal the materials inside; phones show related performances. Hoodies carry garbled lettering inspired by generated text, and hologram fans present the performers’ faces above the costumes.[2]

She also describes working on facial movements so a performer playing a livestreamer would seem like an AI assistant. These details make the imitation a craft problem. The human performer has to produce a convincing version of an image that already looks wrong.[2]

Western Front’s exhibition publication identifies ordinary production disciplines behind that world, including makeup, costumes, props, videography and music. It also describes live performances by four dancers using analogue techniques. The objects extend the film’s fiction into material that can be worn, carried and handled.[4]

A dance can travel back out of the machine

In the Stir interview, Davies connects the work to a wider change in how movement circulates: a dance can become a digital commodity that someone acquires without dancing it themselves. She describes her research as asking how dancers can take an active role in that economy.[3]

Image Syncers offers one artistic answer. The generated body supplies a strange movement vocabulary, and human performers give it intention, physical effort and a social setting. The interesting transformation happens when an image returns to a body.

The current ICA presentation offers the film online; the bags, costumes and holographic objects described in the earlier exhibition materials belong to the installation’s wider life. Watching the film and encountering those physical objects are different ways into the same invented culture.[1][4]

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