Gait Glitch: A workshop on resisting surveillance technologies

In an era when technology is increasingly being used to classify, order, and analyse the body, can we become unpredictable beings together? This workshop, initiated by interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator Soyun Park, explores how collective playfulness can exceed algorithmic legibility—proposing unpredictability as a shared political and poetic gesture.

Under the pretext of “safety”, predictive surveillance has gradually been embedded in ordinary spaces like grocery stores, framing customers as potential risks before any crime has occurred. Gait recognition, a form of biometric surveillance that identifies individuals by the way they walk, takes this a step further by decomposing the body into data points such as stride length, speed, and rhythm. Used by police forces in China and piloted in airports and public spaces elsewhere, artificial intelligence then generates models of “normality” based on these metrics. Yet from nineteenth-century criminal physiognomy to contemporary airport scanners that flag transgender bodies as “anomalies,” biometric classification has consistently produced discrimination alongside security.

Workshop Structure

This workshop invites participants to collectively explore how bodies can become unpredictable in spaces shaped by surveillance. We will begin the workshop with Soyun sharing her year-and-a-half-long research on surveillance algorithms. This will be followed by a talk from Ruben van de Ven, a digital artist and researcher of software culture. He will be sharing his research on surveillance algorithms that order human gait and gestures, and on the reciprocal relation between the algorithm and the individual.

In the second part of the workshop, we will activate our bodies, guided by dancer and choreographer Olympia Kotopoulos. Beginning with a simple awareness exercise of “normal” walking, we will collectively break gait down into elements such as stride, tempo, posture, and rhythm, exaggerating or disrupting each variable to reveal how easily movement becomes standardised. By making playful movement scores together, participants will be able to experiment with confusing pattern recognition and algorithmic systems as they expand their bodily vocabulary.

At the end of the workshop, we will collectively travel to the Beurs van Berlage public square in Amsterdam, which has a live webcam, to activate these scores—liberating our bodies from normalcy and turning collective weirdness into a joyful gesture of resistance.

This workshop invites participants to join as co-researchers in an artistic investigation into how resisting gait recognition and surveillance can activate bodies collectively and question how we regulate our bodies in public space. The workshop will be recorded for research and documentation. Participants can indicate if they prefer not to be filmed, and videographers will avoid filming them, or their image will be blurred.