Brandon Brown is a technologist, dancer, and dj based in Oakland, California. He is currently the lead api developer for the Rap Research Lab and a senior engineer at Civiqs, a progressive online polling firm. He co-founded thePeople, an Oakland based dj collective focused on the curation and celebration of global, underground, Black music, was a 2016-17 YBCA Fellow, and presented at Playtest, an emerging media conference convened by the Library of Congress, in 2018. He received a BA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
“From rum barrel drums, to jazz, to mixing vinyl records, music makers and dancers of African descent, in the Americas, have often repurposed technologies for acts of innovative self expression, subversive self definition, and practices of joy. With Poppy, I will confront the digital commodification of Black dance and the proliferation of biased algorithms by using video based motion capture to create machine learning models from expert dance performances. I will then invite participants to “play” one of these models by using its vocabulary of recognized dance gestures to trigger real-time feedback from an algorithmic musical score.”