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Catie was a 2018 ThoughtWorks Arts Resident, under the theme "Mechanical and Movement: Robotics". More about her residency can be found here and more about the piece can be found here. She collaborated with ThoughtWorks developers and the Consortium for Research and Robotics staff to create OUTPUT, a project including live performance, robotics, motion capture, custom software, short films, an improvisational structure, and a method for choreographing robots. The ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot named Wen is used throughout the piece, as a method of sourcing movement and character. Catie was drawn to the aesthetic and motion qualities of the robot and elected to reframe it as a choreographic source and character.

One central artistic motivation is to illuminate how bodies - of both humans and robots - are mediated and represented through technology. These representations, when embedded into a performance context with the “real” bodies, show how much emotion and expression is lost and transformed across time and reprocessing.

CONCAT is a new tool, built for this project, in order to visualize various moving bodies in portable interfaces. The CONCAT tool was programmed in openFrameworks, using data from the Microsoft Kinect Visual Studio and HAL. MOSAIC was also developed for this project by creative coder Jason Levine. MOSAIC patches short videos together using keyboard commands, much like a loop pedal for choreographed movement.

This project was revisited in summer, 2020, during the making of an augmented reality smartphone application. Individuals can download the AR app to dance alongside the ABB robot and send the resulting video to Catie.

OUTPUT premiered at the 10th Annual Collaborations in Dance Festival at Triskelion Arts (September, 2018) and was demonstrated at the TED Education Weekend (October, 2018), Pioneer Works Second Sundays (April, 2019), the Dance USA Conference (June, 2019), Critical Practices Unit at Stanford University (October, 2019), and TED Education Weekend (February, 2020).

This project was recently featured on the PBS NewsHour and Engadget.

A recent academic paper, “OUTPUT: Translating Robot and Human Movers Across Platforms in a Sequentially Improvised Performance”, was published in the Movement that Shapes Behaviour symposium at the 2019 AISB Convention.

The CONCAT software can be found here.
OUTPUT at Pioneer Works, 2019.
OUTPUT at Dance USA Conference, 2019.