In Conversation with Luna Maurer

Every year, three artists work on their own innovative research at the intersection of technology and society in the NFF Fellowships Programme. In this special programme, everything is up for discussion: the questions being asked, the methods used, even the outcomes are not fixed. To give insight into their work forms, dilemmas, and motivations, Paulien Dresscher, curator of the programme and researcher in the field of digital culture, engages in conversation with the Fellows.

The first Fellow this year is Luna Maurer.

Fellows 2025–2026
Part 1: Luna Maurer

Friction and Flow in a changing world

An AI has no body, but its sweet, sweet language makes me move… It is cool but I am sweating, exhausted. I curl my fingers slightly while bending my upper body, reaching back. My right shoulder twists, reaching forward, building so much tension that the next movements feel like an explosion. My bare feet step quickly over the blue rubber floor. Steps don't matter. But reaching does. I need to grow out of my body, my feet reaching towards the inside of the earth, my upper body towards the sky. Resistance, I feel the resistance. The weight of an imaginary bowling ball pressing against my hand. I hear the voice of my teacher. I just go.

— Luna Maurer, on her experience of dancing, in her essay Friction and Flow

After decades in which we mostly saw technological progress as a source of prosperity, convenience and connection, the mood seems to be shifting. Artificial intelligence has become the new battleground: an engine of collective hope and fear alike. Big Tech companies tell us that AI is on the verge of solving humanity's greatest problems — or of destroying us. While these predictions fly past our ears, almost everyone still rushes to climb aboard the AI train. Afraid of being left behind, companies, governments and individuals are jumping on board en masse.

Behind that collective momentum lurks an uncomfortable question: what space is actually left for us? Not just as employees, creators and thinkers, but as human beings, we find ourselves wondering what our role even is. As machines get better and better at writing, designing, analysing and programming, what becomes of our unique contribution? The worry, perhaps, isn't so much that AI will take over everything, but that we're quietly handing over more and more tasks, responsibilities and, ultimately, meaning. In our race for efficiency, speed and intelligence, are we losing sight of human values? At stake here are human autonomy, creativity, and the sense that we still play a meaningful role in the world we're building.

This is where the discussion touches on Luna Maurer's field of work, which goes beyond conventional tech criticism. She doesn't just examine what technology takes away from us, but also how a machine might amplify, nurture and celebrate human qualities, rather than smoothing experience over. To make that question tangible, Maurer turns to a quintessentially human medium: dance. As she puts it herself: “Unlike the instrumental nature of the machine, dance isn't about efficiency. Dance has no goal, can't be reduced to words, and goes beyond control, calculation or refinement: it essentially reverses every premise of technology.”

Background

This reversal — from instrumental to embodied, from goal to experience — didn't come out of nowhere; it's the result of a long search within Maurer's own practice. Over the past few decades, she worked as a media artist and designer, largely within the collective Moniker, engaging with the latest technologies. At the same time, she watched the technological landscape shift. This shaped her attitude towards technology: her initial optimism about the possibilities of the web gave way to a more pessimistic, critical stance. She began to wonder: how can we bring friction back into digital tech culture? How can I create an environment with technology that actually fosters friction, a machine that stirs the human? So she changed course entirely.

For her Fellowship at the Netherlands Film Festival, Maurer decided to stop exploring these questions from behind a screen alone, and instead engage her whole body, through dance. She turned her studio into a dance floor, trading the screen for movement. There, she entered into conversation with a new partner. Not a human choreographer, but an AI.

This raises an almost paradoxical question: what can an intelligence without a body teach us about physicality? How can a machine that has never walked, fallen or danced make someone move differently? This, precisely, is the heart of Maurer's research.

With Dance Out Of Pattern (DOOP), Maurer explores exactly these questions. She doesn't use AI as a tool or a replacement, but as a conversation partner: a bodiless partner that can nonetheless summon movement through language. It's exactly there that the friction between machine and body emerges.

How does it work?

The system behind Dance Out Of Pattern is, at its core, simple. Maurer feeds the AI a prompt, which the machine processes into a dance instruction, in the form of a humanoid voice: feedback that inspires her to move. Out of this, a kind of dialogue emerges, sometimes visual, narrative or emotional, sometimes absurd.

On the dance floor, Maurer receives this vocal input through her headphones, on which she bases her choreography live. The dance that follows is observed by the machine's eye. The AI then comments on what it sees, to which Maurer responds in turn. This creates a continuous interplay between language and body, between interpretation and reaction.

With DOOP, Maurer investigates whether digital technology can spark new ways of moving, and in doing so, open up different stories — the machine as co-choreographer.

New worlds

Together with the machine, Maurer creates stories — fantastical worldbuilding, she calls it. New worlds emerge in the process. A key part of this process is the design of the prompts, in which she specifically focuses on distinctly human traits that a machine lacks.

Well-functioning prompts, for instance, are ones in which the AI is asked to identify with a specific character, with human traits such as “think like a philosopher” or “you want to have a body, imagine how your limbs would move.” Maurer describes a prompt she recently tested: “You are a child, you wonder about the world and dance, and what the dancer is trying to express.” “That worked surprisingly well,” she says. “Abstract, narrative or philosophical prompts trigger something in me and spark my imagination.” The mindset of a child is, in her view, perhaps the greatest imaginable contrast to AI. “Even if this image of a child is perhaps a bit of a cliché, I'm still trying to create a kind of strange, fused machine-human story, and in doing so, help dance find its way back into the world, in a different form. Put grandly: a new dance movement — as resistance against the instrumental and the calculating!”

Looking back

Beyond the underlying philosophy of this project, Maurer simply enjoys discovering different dance experiences through the various AI roles, and seeing how they influence her movements: “The fantastical body parts the LLM describes wanting to have are fun to play with; I like to interpret them broadly, rather than making the movement purely illustrative. I dance in the studio and develop something that wasn't known beforehand.”

On the dance floor, she balances between listening, responding and improvising. In this way, she sees how prompts shape her movements: sometimes moments of frustration arise, but sometimes moments of flow too. An important part of the process is watching the dance back afterwards and reflecting on it: “Sometimes what I see surprises me. Watching the film is a different experience from the act of dancing itself. While dancing, I pick up on elements or fragments of the AI voice that I can grasp, and then explore further through movement. It's only when watching it back that I fully connect the voice to my movements, and see what actually happened.”

According to Maurer, the machine's feedback moves along a spectrum: on one end, technical instructions for dance movements; on the other, imaginative stories with no direct connection to dancing or moving bodies.

An important part of Maurer's process is the sense that something new is emerging: that she and the AI are developing something together, and that a certain direction is being taken. But that's not always straightforward: “I keep asking myself: which direction do I actually want to go in? Lately, relational prompts have turned out to be the most interesting. Those are prompts that revolve around the relationship between me and the model. Dancing with a ball, for instance, the model might be asked to talk back from the perspective of that ball.”

The form of the AI's memory also plays a role. In the tech world, a model with memory is generally seen as a strength. In Maurer's model, the AI remembers nothing from previous conversations: each session starts fresh, meaning every new prompt can shape an entirely new world.

Friction

For Maurer, DOOP ultimately isn't just about AI, but above all about what happens in the space between human and machine. Friction plays a central role in this, taking on different forms throughout her dance research: physical, relational, and translational.

First, there's physical friction. By using her whole body and moving in ways that are experimental, unfamiliar, awkward or even uncomfortable, resistance arises at a bodily level. It's precisely there that Maurer finds a direct reward: the body is pulled out of fixed patterns, and the act of moving itself brings pleasure.

Then there's relational friction. When the installation works well, a complex relationship forms between dancer and machine. The AI voice suggests, asks, encourages and comments while Maurer dances. She allows herself to be challenged and disrupted by that voice; sometimes she resists its suggestions, sometimes they inspire her. The interaction can be playful and enjoyable, but also strange, absurd or irritating. It's precisely that shifting experience that pushes her deeper into her body: to act, play, experiment and respond.

The third form is friction in translation. In conversation with philosopher Miriam Rasch — author of the book Frictie: ethiek in tijden van dataïsme (Friction: Ethics in an Age of Dataism) and one of the coaches on this trajectory — it became clear to Maurer just how essential translation is. According to Rasch, data and figures are always already a translation of a messy reality that has been cleaned up and simplified. And yet we often act as though we know exactly what that data means, even though everyone can read something different into it. Friction arises precisely by allowing those differing interpretations to exist, rather than smoothing over ambiguity.

In DOOP, that translational friction is magnified. The machine translates Maurer's movements into a prompt, but that translation is never pure: it's noisy, ambiguous, fallible. Maurer then interprets that prompt not literally, but subjectively and intuitively, after which the machine responds again in turn. This creates an ongoing feedback loop — a great noise machine — in which every step is a choice among countless possible directions.

This is exactly why, for Maurer, friction isn't an obstacle to be resolved, but the engine driving the work. The harder she has to work, and the further she's pushed out of her comfort zone, the more interesting, exciting and ultimately satisfying the experience becomes.

And yet, perhaps the project's greatest surprise lies somewhere else entirely. “Maybe the appeal of this project, for me, is actually simpler than I thought. Not because the AI is a disruption or gets in the way of the process, but purely because the machine is there, watching. The machine becomes my witness. Alone in the studio, safe, only the machine sees what happens. It's recorded, and that's exactly what brings out the best in the work. And that same recording is also what makes it possible to share the work later on.”

That shift is part of a broader change in Maurer's own practice. Since trading her studio for a dance floor, she has used her own body as material for her research ever since. “Through dancing, I see myself not only as an external researcher, but also as the material of the research itself. My body is the material. It's through my own body that the research takes shape.”

In this way, Maurer deliberately seeks out friction, not to reject technology, but to make room for doubt, interpretation and new ways of moving. By adding friction and disrupting patterns, she makes visible how technology shapes us, and how we might relate to it anew. Between resistance and surrender, between control and noise, room opens up to move differently, think differently, be different. How can AI bring us closer to ourselves, to our bodies, our imagination, our humanity?

Written by Paulien Dresscher.