Image Syncers is a multimedia installation and performance project that explores how synthetic media increasingly shape perception, behavior, and identity. The work speculates on a near future  where  images no longer represent the world, leaving people in search of new forms of meaning. Looking at TikTok trends where users mimic uncanny AI-generated dance videos, Nina Davies asks the question “Why are people moving like this?” She speculatively answers the question by considering this phenomenon as a traditional dance of the future where people internalize machine logics and choreograph themselves according to computational aesthetics as a way of capturing these generated image worlds in the same way a camera captures the world of our own.
At the center of the installation is a 12-minute video essay presented as an episode of the fictional podcast “What’s Sizzlin’.” In the episode, host Bryce Snyder interviews journalist Teagan Carroll about her investigation into the “Plot Corps,” a mysterious collective attempting to physically transform themselves to resemble AI-generated images. Their conversation expands to reflections on “image syncing,” “perception collapse,” and the evolving relationship between bodies, language, and synthetic media.
Sculptural elements extend the narrative world. Holographic forms appear as spectral stand-ins for the fictional Image Syncers, while transparent backpack-like vitrines display personal belongings, smartphones, and props linked to the group’s attempts to recreate AI-generated imagery through analogue techniques such as costume, makeup, and props.
A live performance activates the installation as an open rehearsal by the Image Syncers. Performers attempt to reproduce gestures derived from AI-generated videos while audiences encounter the choreography through iPhones mounted on ring lights that livestream and synchronize the movements across multiple screens, mirroring the networked interfaces through which the fictional group communicates with algorithmic systems.

Performers: Dave Biddle, Torien Cafferata, Lisa Christiansen, Sula Castle, Livona Ellis, Jose Funnell, Gracy Gandhi, Kevyn Hu, Alger Liang, Alicia Laing, Sihan Ling, Christina Lovey, Nathaniel Marchand, Rebecca Margolick, Manuel Muñoz, Andy Newman, Duane Nasis, Richard Pye, Simon Roberts, Niloufar Samadi, Gian Singh Sanghera-Warren, Noah Sawchuck, David Varhegyi, Christoph Von Riedemann, Scott Young
Videography: Studio Reverse Magic
Photography: Dan Jackson
Music: FHUR
Make up artist: Kendahl Labrah Jung
Costumes/props: Kitty Blandy
With support from: Canada Council for the Arts; Western Front, Vancouver, Canada

Nina Davies (CA) considers the present moment through observing how dance in popular culture is disseminat;ed, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been exhibited at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Aksioma, Ljuljana; FACT, Liverpool; Western Front, Vancouver; and Artspace, Sydney. 

Nina Davies begins with an observation drawn from TikTok: people are starting to mimic AI-generated dance videos, contorting their bodies to match the machine's hallucinated anatomy. A twelve-minute video essay, framed as an episode of the podcast What's Sizzlin', follows a journalist investigating the "Plot Corps," a collective attempting to physically resemble AI-generated images. In the live performance, dancers reproduce gestures pulled from AI clips while the audience watches through iPhones mounted on ring lights that livestream the movements across multiple screens. Motion passes through the same loop of capture, compression and restaging that produced the source material. The jury was drawn to its clear-eyed account of how synthetic media reach into the body, treated as behavioral pattern rather than as spectacle, and how technology propagates through ritual.