27 Nov 2025
Beyond the Nightclub: Nina Davies on speculative movement in the age of the digital twin
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
“I’m really interested in legal theory in relation to technology. I think the law is the ultimate world-building tool, and I like to consider some of my work legal fiction—as opposed to science fiction. I sometimes take historical legal cases and reimagine them under a new set of conditions, and I have also imagined futures of legal tech that are currently being tested and implemented.”
In a world where every gesture risks being captured, replicated, and recirculated, artist and choreographer Nina Davies examines how the moving body negotiates visibility, control, and agency in post-digital culture. Her work, spanning video, performance, and speculative fiction, maps the evolving relationship between choreography, technology, and social behaviour. At once critical and playful, Nina treats dance not only as an art form but as a language—a mutable interface through which we experience the algorithmic realities of our time.
Davies’ practice unravels how movement circulates within and beyond the screen and “post-digital dance” for her is not a futuristic abstraction but an extension of the long historical entanglement between technology and embodiment. From ritual and martial dances to TikTok micro-choreographies, she traces how tools—whether agricultural implements or smartphone cameras—have always shaped how we move. Her performances and films reveal the continuity between the ancient and the synthetic, the physical and the virtual. The artist’s speculative approach offers a way to test the boundaries of our current systems, from surveillance to social media, from algorithmic choreography to the politics of bodily autonomy. Davies reimagines dance as an asemic language, one that speaks without words yet resonates through systems of control and connection. In doing so, she invites us to rethink what it means to move, to act, and to remain human in an era when even our gestures are edits in progress.
Alexander Burenkov: Your work often explores the movement vocabularies of post-digital bodies. How do you define “post-digital dance”, and what draws you to its language?
Nina Davies: I like to actually frame this vocabulary of movement under the umbrella of traditional dance, which so many relate to agricultural and fighting tools/technologies that would have been used at the time. So there’s a long-standing relationship between technology and the dancing body, and I like to think of the dances we see online today—where people move like NPCs, in slow motion, or like AI-generated videos—as a continuation of this practice.
AB: You explore shifts in social dance as it moves away from nightclubs and into digital realms. How has digital culture transformed the clubbing experience, and would you one day be interested in creating artistic interventions within a nightclub context?
ND: I don’t want to entirely rule out making work in a nightclub context; however, I’m more interested in expanding on where dance can exist. We know dance to exist in nightclub environments and expect it to be there. When I say I’m interested in looking for places in which dance can exist, I’m not talking about inserting dance into random environments, like you might see in a music video or advertisement. I think it’s interesting to see where dance might have a use function in non-dance-based environments—such as dancing to evade surveillance technology or dancing as a way to tamper with evidence of real-life events. To answer the first part of the question, I would say I’m also interested in what places and environments new technologies are taking dance to.
AB: Your solo exhibition at Seventeen Gallery foregrounded “becoming the edit” as both a performative strategy and a metaphor. Could you expand on how this phrase crystallizes the tensions between embodiment and mediation in post-digital culture, where our gestures are constantly already edits-in-process?
ND: While I was working towards this show, I was looking a lot at the “tube girl” and “bro thinks he’s in an edit” trends on TikTok. While there are loads of directions I could have speculatively taken on this form of choreography, I wanted to focus on what it meant to move like an edit—what’s the purpose of it beyond giving main-character energy. I thought about what encountering people in public spaces moving like an edit would be like—raw, no music, no smartphone framing. I felt as though there was some form of resistance to losing control of one's own image.
AB: You frequently work with voiceovers and narrators that seem both human and synthetic. What role does the voice play in your exploration of identity and performativity?
ND: Funnily enough, I think this question shows how believable AI voiceovers have become. All the voices I use in my videos are friends or acquaintances (including a woman who I did jury service with for three weeks).
Most of my films begin with a script for a fictional podcast, which I record and edit as an entire episode. I then take this sound work and cut it up to present it as if it’s found footage and use that to make a video work. It’s sort of like editing a music video, where I already have the finished track that I edit to.
I think there’s something about the confidence and casual nature of podcasting that I’m interested in. It’s super distinct from other forms of dialogue, and I like to play around with conversations going off on tangents, which I sometimes include in the video. Although I think this is sometimes why some people find it hard to follow my videos—they often mistake the tangential conversation for key plot points.
AB: Your use of speculative fiction often stages near futures shaped by computational intelligence and predictive technologies. To what extent do you see fiction not only as a narrative tool but also as a critical method for engaging with the post-digital present—a way of rehearsing the consequences of systems we are already living within? Do you have a favourite work of sci-fi literature that informs your thinking?
ND: One of my favourite books is The Silent History by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby. I read the book version, but it’s originally a post-print book designed to be consumed through an app. The story is about an epidemic spreading among new-born children who are physically normal in every way except that they do not speak and do not respond to speech. The story is told through various field reports by characters who can speak—like teachers, parents, and researchers. In the last third of the book, a technology is invented that allows these children—who are by this point adults—to speak, and you suddenly start reading field reports written by the same characters you’ve been reading about, but from someone else's perspective. I won’t go any further as I don’t want to spoil the rest. But I really enjoy stories that have some kind of language breakdown, or where language becomes toxic. And I feel like I, in some ways, bring that into my work—but from the opposite perspective, where dance and the moving body start to turn into a language.
AB: How do you use fiction and futurism to reflect on present-day digital conditions?
ND: I mainly use future perspectives as a way to look back at our time, rather than it coming from a desire to create futures. Of course, in order to do that, I have to create a future and think about how the present day would relate to people looking back. But what initially drew me to using speculation and designing futures was a role-play tool for myself—to think about emerging dance trends today as traditional dances of the future. Dances aren’t created to exist as traditional dances… they become traditional dances over time. So we only encounter information and stories about these dances from a future perspective. There’s also a murkiness and extra speculative layer you can play with when you create characters who are looking back… as they too have to speculate on a past—however distant or close that past may be.
In terms of the non-dance-based narratives in my stories, I’m really interested in legal theory in relation to technology. I think the law is the ultimate world-building tool, and I like to consider some of my work legal fiction—as opposed to science fiction. I sometimes take historical legal cases and reimagine them under a new set of conditions, and I have also imagined futures of legal tech that are currently being tested and implemented.
AB: In Precursing which was originally shown at Matt’s Gallery in London in 2023, you referenced virtual characters and algorithmic choreography. How do you think in-game movement and platform aesthetics influence our embodied selves in real life?
ND: Precursing looked at the trend of moving like an NPC—not so much NPC streaming, but just people moving around public spaces as NPCs. Like I do with all my work, I always start with the question “why are people moving like this”? and then I speculatively answer that question. I’d come across a few papers about how self-driving car software is trained in the virtual environments of games such as GTA. I thought there was an interesting link between these fictional virtual environments and the real ones in which these cars/software will eventually be deployed. I used the case of the Hammersmith Ghost, which was a Victorian legal case continually disputed among the justice community, as it was the first case where “mistaken belief” was used as a defence in court. I made up a fictional case where a self-driving car swerves around an NPC apparition, which results in hitting a real person. In this fictional world, people begin to realise that moving like an NPC becomes a way of being detected by these networks more accurately—and it becomes a way of moving through this rapidly advancing networked world.
Image Syncing is based on a niche TikTok trend where people move as if they are in generated videos. While I was stewing on this kind of content, I saw that during the run-up to the US elections, Trump claimed that images of Kamala Harris’ rally crowds were AI-generated. I thought it wouldn’t be crazy if someone who makes this kind of “real-life” AI content turned up to a rally as a form of sabotage to claim that the images were generated. While this is not something people actually do, I thought it was important to create two communities in this story who move like this—those who originally perform these gestures as a way of trying to communicate with synthetic intelligence, and those who have taken these gestures and use them for more nefarious purposes.
AB: You often blur the lines between speculative documentary and performance. How do you envision your practice evolving at a time when authenticity and digitality are becoming increasingly indistinguishable?
ND: In the past, I’ve read a fair bit of Katherine Hayles’ work, who describes herself as an affirmative post-human writer. She mentions in one of her books that we need to redefine what the human is, both with and against technology. We find ourselves at a point where some of the things that used to define humans against other forms of intelligence are now things we share with technical beings (she is speaking specifically about language here). I really like the question of what it is that makes us different, and I don’t know whether I have an answer, but I think there's something exciting in the pursuit of redefining what being human is. And I don’t mean that in the sense that we need something that sets us apart or something that makes us special, but more so that we’ve become a blank slate. Katherine Hayles suggests that what makes us human is our obsession with mark-making. She thinks that we may see a rise in asemic languages, which are languages that don’t belong to any form of semantics. And I guess that’s where I think dance intersects with this hypothesis. Is dancing (or moving our bodies in new ways) a form of asemic language? And if so, how and what is it communicating, and who is it communicating with?
AB: Your the most recent project MEET ME IN THE DIGITAL TWIN which has opened at FACT Liverpool in October 2025 merges lived experience and speculative fiction. How did the collaboration with Eve, Luke, and Mel shape your thinking about authorship, empathy, and shared storytelling in a post-digital context?
ND: From an artistic point of view, the thing that I really enjoyed about this process of making work was having three people make their own characters who engage in the story and world that I’d built. Not to say that the world was entirely made by me, as the stories that were shared by Mel, Luke, and Eve informed the world massively. I usually write independently, and the characters I write are usually different versions of myself. But in this project, I had three characters that I would have never been able to write.
Working with participants whose stories are deeply personal — and then reimagining them through a digital twin — suggests a kind of emotional translation across realities. How did you navigate the ethics of transforming real experiences into speculative narrative?
When I was invited by FACT to do this project, they asked me in the very first meeting how I would imagine approaching a project like this. I had never done participatory work before, so I had no tried and tested approach to fall back on. But one thing seemed clear to me: I shouldn’t enter into this project with my personal research interests in dance in the foreground. I thought my voice might become too strong within the work, and dance wasn’t the research focus of this work anyway—it was the experience of living with and beyond cancer as a young adult/teenager. So I decided to take the approach of rethinking these experiences through fiction. I thought that by doing it in this way, Eve, Luke, and Mel would have control over how much they wanted the audience to know about their personal experiences.
AB: The use of a digital twin as both a technological and narrative device is fascinating. What drew you to this concept, and how do you see it reflecting broader post-digital questions of presence, memory, and simulation?
ND: During some of my independent research for this project, I came across an article about how the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in Liverpool operates through a digital twin—specifically the monitoring of the building’s internal temperature. While we had already begun thinking through the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre and their experiences through fiction—for the narrative to work, you always need an inciting incident. So I proposed to the group that the narrative could be based at some point in the future, where cancer doesn’t exist anymore and the building has turned into a radioactive zone (because of something going wrong in the past with the radiotherapy machinery). The only thing that remains is the digital twin in some servers found on the radioactive site. And this is where we began making the three characters—each with their own set of expertise—who are going to figure out what people used to do in this space.
So we imagined what kind of data we would find on the digital twin and then made the speculative leap that the digital twin would have accidentally included/kept WiVi (WiFi Vision) data—which is data of how people move through a space, collected by radio waves emitted from everyday routers. And through this data, the characters noticed that certain people in the building were duplicating. This was very much in response to the fact that cancer is not a disease but rather when one’s own cells no longer respond to the normal signals that regulate cell growth and death. And so, in a sense, a cancer centre is a place where—through whatever method—you separate yourself from this part of yourself. I thought that through the data, it might seem as if people were duplicating. That’s just one example of how we fictionalised the experiences of living with and beyond cancer. And as you can see in this example, how quickly our narrative developed into a science-fiction documentary. I mean, a cancer centre feels as though it already is somewhere from a sci-fi novel. So the leap we made into science fiction wasn’t too big.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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