Correction notice (2026-08-03). This page was originally published in question-and-answer format containing dialogue attributed to Thecla Schiphorst. No interview took place and that dialogue was constructed. It has been withdrawn and replaced with the source-verified profile below, which draws only on published work and public institutional sources. The Lab regrets the original publication and has since adopted an editorial rule prohibiting simulated interviews.
Thecla Schiphorst is a Canadian digital media artist and academic on the faculty of the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. She was a member of the original design team behind Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography, and collaborated with Merce Cunningham from 1990 to 2005 in support of his creation of new dance made with the computer. Her research develops embodied interaction — movement knowledge representation, wearable and tangible technologies, and the aesthetics of interaction — and it matters to somatic AI because it treats first-person bodily experience as a design foundation rather than a subject to be modelled from outside.
This is a source-verified profile, not an interview. It is assembled from published work and public institutional sources. No direct interview was conducted and no dialogue is reconstructed.
Background and position
Schiphorst holds an interdisciplinary MA in Dance and Computing Science from Simon Fraser University (1993) and a PhD from the School of Computing at the University of Plymouth (2008). She is a faculty member at SFU's School of Interactive Arts and Technology and has held leadership roles within the school; published sources differ on her current title, so the SFU faculty page linked below should be treated as authoritative.
Her dual formation in dance and computing is the basis of her research programme rather than a biographical curiosity. Public accounts consistently describe her background in dance and computing as forming the basis for research in embodied interaction, with a focus on movement knowledge representation, tangible and wearable technologies, media and digital art, and the aesthetics of interaction.
Life Forms and the Cunningham collaboration
Life Forms was among the first computer tools built specifically for choreographic composition, allowing a choreographer to construct and manipulate movement sequences on screen. Schiphorst was a member of its original design team. Her collaboration with Merce Cunningham ran from 1990 to 2005, supporting his creation of new dance with the computer.
This period is historically significant beyond its biographical interest. It represents one of the earliest sustained working relationships between a major choreographer and computational tools for composition, and it establishes that the questions now being asked about human-AI co-creation in movement — what a computational collaborator contributes, what the choreographer retains, how the tool shapes the work — have a documented precedent stretching back more than three decades.
The whisper[s] research group
Schiphorst leads the whisper[s] research group, whose name is an acronym: wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive systems.
The acronym functions as a research statement. Most computing is designed for a generalised user, whereas each term here specifies the opposite orientation — toward the intimate, personal and sensory rather than the standardised. This is consistent with the broader position her work advances: that technologies engaging the body must be designed around particular, felt, first-person experience rather than an averaged model of a user.
Why this matters for somatic AI
Schiphorst's work anticipates by decades a limitation that motion AI research has only recently begun to measure. Systems built to model bodies from the outside — from video, from motion capture, from joint trajectories — do not thereby gain access to the qualities that somatic practice works with. That gap became empirically demonstrable in July 2026, when a robotics benchmark showed vision-based control systems failing systematically under real physical human contact, because force and contact state are not present in camera images; the Lab's account is in why a robot can see your hand but cannot feel it.
Her contribution is to have argued, and demonstrated through built systems, that the alternative is not merely better instrumentation but a different design orientation — beginning from the designer's own embodied knowing. This argument has since been formalised as a teachable design methodology by others working in the same tradition, as covered in the Lab's profile of soma design and the trained perceiver, and it forms part of a lineage that also includes choreographic method applied to robotics.
Where to read further
- SFU School of Interactive Arts and Technology faculty page — authoritative source for current role, projects and contact.
- Google Scholar profile — the full publication record, and the appropriate source for her research arguments in her own words.
- ISEA Symposium Archives — documentation of her presented artistic and research work in the international electronic art context.
References
Schiphorst, T. (n.d.). Faculty profile. School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/siat/people/research-faculty/thecla-schiphorst.html
Schiphorst, T. (n.d.). Google Scholar profile. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=B3LzIcMAAAAJ&hl=en
Thecla Schiphorst. ISEA Symposium Archives. https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/person/thecla-schiphorst/
Thecla Schiphorst. Monoskop. https://monoskop.org/Thecla_Schiphorst