My research focusses on how movement shapes knowledge—and how the ways we make sense of movement influence which bodies and experiences become intelligible and valued. Working across choreography, technology, and performance philosophy, I investigate these questions through artistic practice, writing, and collective inquiry.
Choreography functions as both a critical framework and a method in my work. Through making, performing, and attending to movement, I investigate how bodies become perceptible and recognisable, how technologies participate in these processes, and what exceeds their frames of representation.
The following strands bring together ongoing questions in my research, developed through performance, somatic practice, writing, and collective inquiry.
Research Strands · Publications · Invited Talks · Conference Presentations
Research Strands
Dancing Deepfakes: Motion Transfer in Synthetic Media
My recent work examines how movement moves, materially and algorithmically, in synthetic media. Through experiments with what dance scholar Hetty Blades and I term “dancing deepfakes”, I generate videos and learn to embody their movement, investigating how AI-generated movement unsettles bodily recognition, agency, and authorship. This practice-based research, developed through AMO: Ambiguous Moving Objects, draws on critical phenomenology to examine how movement is perceived and experienced as it passes between bodies, images, and data.
Critical Appropriation: Artistic Practice with Surveillance and Biomedical Technologies
I create durational performance-installations involving surveillance and biomedical technologies to explore intimacy and the limits of bodily measurement and control. My collaboration with composer and computer scientist John MacCallum, now working as Friction Field Collaborative, includes the bodies of work III and Im/mediations. Developed through these works, my PhD, and publications, critical appropriation describes an approach to working with technologies that probes how their meanings and uses shift across contexts, and how they participate in shaping bodily relations and experiences.
Interstitial Listening: Synchrony and Impossible Tasks
Together with John MacCallum, I facilitate Interstitial Listening, a transdisciplinary workshop and somatic practice rooted in breathwork and biosensing. The practice centres on a simple but impossible task: to synchronise movement, sound, or breath with an unpredictable metronome. Through this attempt, we attend to the rhythmic textures that emerge in response, exploring how an impossible task can reveal habits of anticipation, attention, and relation.
The Choreographic Gaze: How Movement Becomes Intelligible
My writing examines how movement becomes intelligible through language, notation, images, and computation—and how these processes influence which bodies and experiences become recognisable and valued. I am developing the concept of the choreographic gaze to investigate how movement is organised through its representation, drawing on choreography’s concern with attention, orientation, timing, and relationality. This inquiry informs articles in development and my monograph, How Movement Comes to Matter: A Genealogy of the Choreographic Gaze.
Pedagogies of Opacity: How Different Ways of Knowing Meet
My research extends into pedagogy and institutional practice, where I ask how divergent ways of knowing can meet without being flattened by demands for immediate legibility or translation. Through the Provocations Project and Transversal Imaginaries, I co-develop experimental formats for collective inquiry across disciplines. I am exploring pedagogies of opacity as a way of attending to what remains difficult to articulate or understand within these encounters, and how we might sustain difference in learning and working together. These concerns are developed further in the Pedagogy section.
Publications
Naccarato, T. (2022). Review of The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 14(1), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00067_5
Naccarato, T., & MacCallum, J. (2020). Cutting together-apart (une greffe). Performance Research, 25(5), 135–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1868855
MacCallum, J., & Naccarato, T. (2019). Collaboration as differentiation: Rethinking interaction intra-actively. Performance Philosophy, 4(2), 410–433. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/234
Naccarato, T., & MacCallum, J. (2019). The touch of the stethoscope: Shaping context in intimate performance. TEMPO, 73(287), 71–75. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298218000669
Naccarato, T. (2019). Review of Radio Strainer: Part Two of the Kinesthetic Archive. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 11(1), 129–135. https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jdsp.11.1.129_5
Naccarato, T. (2019). Re/contextualization: On the critical appropriation of technologies as artistic practice [PhD thesis]. Coventry University.
Naccarato, T. (2018). Artistic practice as research: A genealogical account. In S. Ellis, H. Blades & C. Waelde (Eds.), A World of Muscle, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance (pp. 435–455). C-DaRE, Coventry University.https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/publications/artistic-practice-as-research-a-genealogical-account/
MacCallum, J., Naccarato, T., Boudou, L., & Pelinka, S. (2017). Peripheral encounters. Leonardo, 50(3), 240–241.
Kirk, P., Naccarato, T., & MacCallum, J. (2017). Intimate listening. Performance Research, 22(3), 57–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1348589
Naccarato, T., & MacCallum, J. (2017). Critical appropriations of biosensors in artistic practice. Proceedings of the International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO ’17), London, UK. https://doi.org/10.1145/3077981.3078053
Naccarato, T., & MacCallum, J. (2016). From representation to relationality: Bodies, biosensors and mediated environments. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 8(1), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.8.1.57_1
MacCallum, J., & Naccarato, T. (2015). The impossibility of control: Real-time negotiations with the heart. Proceedings of Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA London 2015), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2015.1
MacCallum, J., & Naccarato, T. (2015). Choreography and composition of internal time. Workshop on Collaborating with Intelligent Machines: Interfaces for Creative Sound, CHI 2015, Seoul, South Korea.
Naccarato, T. (2013). Recipe for a dance artist: Vulnerability, intimacy & uncertainty in creative process. In C. M. Press & E. C. Warburton (Eds.), Creating Dance: A Traveller’s Guide. Hampton Press.
Invited Talks
2026
An Ontology of Motion / A Phenomenology of Being Stopped
Ontology & Ownership Working Group, facilitated by Prof. Hetty Blades. Online.
2025
Re/matérialiser le cœur : l’éthico-esthétique du « faire ensemble » (with John MacCallum)
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France.
2023
AI & Ethics in Artistic Practice (public conversation with Marco Donnarumma)
Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, UK.
2021
Politics, Identity, and Representation in Multimedia Performance (with John MacCallum)
MUTOR Lecture Series, HfMT Hamburg, Germany.
2021
Dance, Interaction, and Virtuality in Contemporary Performance
MUTOR Lecture Series, HfMT Hamburg, Germany.
2020
Once Re/moved: Bodies, Time, and Representation in Performance (with John MacCallum)
Kinetics in Sound and Space Colloquium, HfMT Hamburg; Alter-Eco, Synthesis Center, Arizona State University, USA.
2020
Intersections in Music, Movement, and Technology (with John MacCallum)
Synthesis Center, Arizona State University, USA.
2016–2018
Biosensors as an Intervention in Creative Practice (with John MacCallum)
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London (2018); C-DaRE, Coventry (2016); Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London (2016); Colloquium on Interdisciplinary Creation/Research Methodologies, Santiago, Chile (2016).
2015
Intimate Choreographic Interventions
Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
2015
Accidental Archives of the Heart
“Performing the Accidental Archive” Symposium, York University, Toronto, Canada.
2014–2015
Choreography and Composition of Internal Time (with John MacCallum)
“Reversing Cybernetics – Queering Control”, Metabody Symposium, UC Berkeley, with demonstration and panel (2015); EFFICACe Symposium, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montreal (2015); Department of Music, UC Berkeley (2015); IRCAM Séminaires Recherche et Création, Paris (2014, two talks); Goldsmiths, University of London (2014); University of Sussex (2014).
Conference Presentations
2026
Speculative Bodies: Dance, AI, and the Politics of Motion Transfer (paper)
Dance Studies Association, Long Beach, USA, 23–25 October 2026.
2026
Dancing Deepfakes: Critical Phenomenology and the Reorientation of Movement in Synthetic Media (paper)
Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Conference, London, UK, 2–5 September 2026.
2025
Encoding Motion: The Choreographic Gaze and the Ethics of Representation (paper)
10th International Conference on Communication & Media Studies, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, 11 September 2025.
2024
Data Assemblies and Critical Digital Praxis (panellist)
Dance Studies Association, London, UK. Convened by Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench.
2023
Extra-disciplinary Encounters (panellist)
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Tempe, USA. With Sha Xin Wei, John MacCallum and Oana Suteu Khintirian.
2022
Practicing Ethical Entanglements: Thinking Forward in Technological Praxis (panellist)
Dance Studies Association, Vancouver, Canada. Convened by Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench.
2021
Prototyping Social Forms: Cultivating Process Germs and Probing Knowledge Ecologies (conference workshop)
Society for Media Studies (GfM), University of Innsbruck, Austria. With Sha Xin Wei, Muindi Fanuel Muindi, John MacCallum et al.
2018
Accessibility: Identity, Disciplinary Practice & Research (panellist)
Dance in Higher Education: Research Excellence Framework, London, UK.
2017
Critical Appropriations of Biosensors in Artistic Practice (paper, with John MacCallum)
International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO), London, UK.
2015
The Impossibility of Control: Real-time Negotiations with the Heart (paper and demonstration, with John MacCallum)
Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA), London, UK, July 2015.
2014
Choreographies of Attention and Control: Biosensors, Networks and Embodiment in Installation and Performance (roundtable)
International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Dubai, UAE.
2014
Intimate Examinations: Experience #1167 (paper)
Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Montreal, Canada. Working group: Art & Performance: Making Trauma Visible.
2014
Intimacies: Self-Sacrifice & Preservation in Performance (panellist)
Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, Chicago, USA.
2013
Interactive Performance in Infinite Dimensions (roundtable, with Sha Xin Wei and Navid Navab)
M3D: Movement in 3 Dimensions Conference, MIRL Lab, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
2011
Exposure: Bodies from the Inside-Out and Outside-In (paper)
Hayes Graduate Research Forum, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA.
2010
What the Body Knows: Performance Practice as Research (working group convener)
Congress on Research in Dance / American Society for Theatre Research Conference, Seattle, USA.