As AI moves out of the screen and into the physical world, what does it mean for machines to move, sense and adapt?

Second Natures is a new presentation by artist and choreographer Wayne McGregor at Kraftwerk Berlin, exploring physical intelligence amid the rapid development of 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 three new LAS commissions. The continuous presence of the dancers of Company Wayne McGregor offers audiences an unusually close encounter with the live body as the choreography unfolds.

Investment in AI and robotics is accelerating, with advances in sensing, perception, prediction and control enabling autonomous machines to navigate and act in physical environments. This field, known as embodied or physical AI, focuses on developing systems that can integrate these capabilities, linking perception, decision-making and action in real time.

McGregor has spent more than 30 years investigating intelligence through movement, across choreography, cognitive science, AI and robotics. Second Natures brings these different fields together to explore how physical intelligence is formed, learned and expressed. The title points to a skill developed through training and repetition until it becomes instinctive. It changes not only what a body can do, but what it notices and anticipates. Artificial systems are also shaped by training, data and interaction. Second Natures takes this distinction as its starting point, opening up 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 humans and machines 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.

“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?”

— Wayne McGregor

In a dedicated learning space, visitors can explore the project’s artistic processes and technologies through hands-on activities, resources and choreographic exercises in McGregor’s Mind and Movement tool. A programme of talks and public conversations brings artists and researchers into dialogue across AI, robotics and philosophy, examining the questions, tensions and critical debates shaping this emerging field.