Wayne McGregor: Second Natures

LAS Art Foundation presents Second Natures by artist and choreographer Wayne McGregor, which explores physical intelligence amidst the rapid development and growing critical debate around embodied AI. For the first time in Germany, McGregor brings his choreographic practice beyond the stage into installations made with collaborating artists, including new LAS commissions. Throughout the six-week run, Company Wayne McGregor’s dancers inhabit Kraftwerk Berlin, their sustained physical presence offering audiences an intimate encounter with the live body. 

McGregor has spent more than 30 years investigating intelligence through movement, working across choreography, cognitive science, AI and robotics. Second Natures brings these fields together to explore how physical intelligence is formed, learned and expressed, raising questions about the capabilities, limits and wider implications of physical AI. At the core of the presentation are the new LAS commissions TACITERE, Of Many Minds and 30 Watts of Mortality, presented alongside existing works, including A Body for AI, Deepstaria Void and a selection of past works.

Emerging from nearly twenty years of creative dialogue between art group Random International and Wayne McGregor, TACITERE and Of Many Minds are interrelated works. Of Many Minds (2027) is a sculpture by Random International comprising a flock of autonomous roving spheres, clad in a tactile ‘skin’, that sense and respond to the movement, proximity and touch of visitors. The work considers the potential for haptic and gestural communication between humans and synthetic entities, skin to skin.

TACITERE (2027) is a work of choreography, light and sound in which the dancers of Company Wayne McGregor bring their trained, intuitive physical intelligence into relation with Of Many Minds’ autonomous spheres. Dancers and spheres draw and deflect one another, and from this exchange, a shared, distributed intelligence arises, with human and machine forming one cognitive loop. The work is enacted intermittently throughout the day.

30 Watts of Mortality (2027) by Wayne McGregor and Theresa Baumgartner uses biological sensors to register aspects of the dancers’ internal states as they move. It enacts a research enquiry into how bodily states can influence movement, decision-making and creativity. The work’s title points to the body’s remarkable capacity for physical intelligence with very little energy, and to the question of vulnerability: how might AI decision-making change if it were shaped by the changing states of a mortal body?

A Body for AI (2025), made with Ben Cullen Williams, is a large-scale projection onto a suspended kinetic sculpture. It combines different media, from live-action footage and LiDAR to video produced by AI models trained on choreographic and landscape data. These elements foreground shifting relationships between body, movement, machine and environment.

Originally commissioned by Studio Wayne McGregor, Deepstaria Void (2025) is a soundscape by Invisible Mountain that is continuously recomposed by the digital audio engine Bronze AI. The sonic journey unfolds across Kraftwerk Berlin, creating a thread that runs through the works.

Together, the works create a space to consider physical intelligence in human and artificial bodies and how it takes shape through sensing, training and repetition — the making of our second natures.

Wayne McGregor says, “Second Natures dives into how intelligence is cultivated through experience, practice and conditioning. Living in a body, in the world, we build a tacit intelligence that becomes second nature. But what happens when there is no first nature, no body, only training, data and adaptation? What gives embodied intelligence its stakes, its capacity to learn and its particular way of being in the world?”

Carly Whitefield, Head of Programme, LAS Art Foundation, says, “Wayne McGregor’s work offers a distinctive lens through which to examine embodied AI. Second Natures asks what physical intelligence means in the absence of the vulnerability and lived experience that shape human bodies. It brings timely research surrounding physical AI into public view, creating opportunities to question what its growing presence in the world means for us.”

Press contact: Selin Sahin, Senior Communications Manager, selin.sahin@las-art.foundation