OPEN CALL CLIP #8: What the Body Refuses to Give

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Has a camera, an app, or an algorithm ever told you who you are - and got it completely wrong?

For this edition of Collective Learning in Practice (CLiP), we are looking for a group of young people to collaboratively and creatively explore how AI and other systems see, read, and categorise our bodies — and what they fail to see.

CLIP #8: What the Body Refuses to Give, curated and facilitated by Fernanda Olivares, is a six-month program for collective (un)learning at the intersection of AI systems, embodied knowledge, glitches, and the limits of legibility.

Every day, systems are reading your body. Facial recognition cameras. Social media algorithms that decide what you see based on how long you paused. Apps that model your movement, your preferences, your mood. These systems build a version of you: simplified, categorised, optimised for legibility.

But your body knows things that don't fit into a category. The way you eat or walk to the bus. The gesture you make when you're nervous that no one else makes exactly like you. These things are not noise or error. The actual body, its improvisation, resistance, ambiguity, and imperfection are what they struggle to model.

CLiP #8 is a space to ask: what does your body know that the machine isn't allowed to see? And: what happens when a group of young makers decide to explore and answer in collectivity?

WHAT IS CLIP?

Collective Learning in Practice (CLiP) is the successor to Kunstinstituut Melly’s successful Work-Learn Project (2018) and has run seven editions to date. CLiP gives participants the opportunity to study contemporary art issues and work with our team to make the institution more publicly accessible. Each edition supports 10–14 young participants with the tools, skills, and inspiration to grow as individuals, decision-makers, and professionals through a six-month study period.

WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?

Over six months, we will build a shared language: through movement, reading, conversation, and hybrid experimentation to understand how AI systems read bodies, and to collectively decide what we refuse to give them.

Reading the machine

We learn how AI systems are built, what data they're trained on, whose bodies were included and whose were left out along with the implications for how they see you.

Choreographic prompting

We write movement instructions for generative AI systems and examine what gets lost, distorted, or refused in translation. We use glitches, impossible movements, and misreading as an experimenting playground.

Body mapping sessions & 3D scans

Using apps and/or other devices, we scan each other's gestures and body postures and watch how an AI system reconstructs them. What does it keep, and what does it smooth away? How to recover and rewrite our body's voice?

Collective reading and guests

We read texts and meet artists, researchers, and practitioners whose work lives at the edges of AI, analog practice, movement, and community.

Making something together

The form of our final output (a performance, a publication, an archive, an exhibition, a walk) or entirely something else will be decided by the group. What you want to make is part of the program.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

You don't need a background in art, technology, or dance. You need a body and something you want to understand about how the world reads it.

CLiP #8 is open to young people aged 17-24, based in or near Rotterdam. We especially welcome participants whose communities have been historically misrepresented, misread, or made invisible by data systems, and those who are curious about that, whatever their background.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION

- CLiP will run for six months, from October 2026 – March 2027.

- The program will start on October 9th and take place every Friday from 1–4 PM at Kunstinstituut Melly, Witte de Withstraat 50, Rotterdam.

- Participants receive a temporary contract and are paid €17.50 per hour.

- CLiP #8 will be conducted in English.

- In some sessions participants will be asked to use their own laptop.

Want to know more before applying? Come to Kunstinstituut Melly on a Friday between 10:00 and 14:00, or email us at [email protected]. We'll be glad to talk and help.

HOW TO APPLY

Send us a short video filmed on your phone (nothing fancy), maximum 3 minutes, to applications [at] kunstinstituutmelly.nl until September 13th at 23:59 CET.

Answer these four questions:

1. Who are you and what communities do you belong to? This can mean neighbourhood, family, culture, language, a group of friends, a way of moving through the world.

2. Show us a gesture you make every day; something small, specific, yours. Don't explain it. Just do it. It can be as simple as how you hold your phone, how you sit, how you say hello to a friend.

3. Has a system (an app, a camera, a form, a category) ever read you wrong? What did it miss? It doesn't have to be about AI. It can be any moment where you felt reduced to something smaller than what you are.

4. Why do you want to join CLiP #8? There's no right answer. We want to hear what draws you here.

The preselected applicants will be notified on September 16th to attend a collective interview that will take place at Melly on Friday, September 18th between 11 AM–2 PM.