What was your childhood like?
— As humans, we all feel an immediate physical response upon reading these words. Our bodies carry knowledge that can translate these feelings into movement. These movements can, in turn, touch and evoke emotions, among other things. We find this phenomenon incredibly interesting and relevant to the essence of what makes us human.

Starting in October 2025, supported guest artist Amit Palgi (Mixed Signal Collective) and creative technologist Joyce den Hertog began a process of inviting an intelligence without a body or feelings to explore this phenomenon with us; to tease, challenge, and inspire us to wonder: What is this intuition? And what is its future?

Inspired by the Turing Test, which highlighted human language capabilities and a machine’s understanding of them, our research aims to highlight the emotional-intuitive capabilities of humans. We are developing a Turing Test for somatic dance movement—a “True-ing Test”—and will observe how AI generates intuitive movements in response to questions, compared to human dancers. We are developing a prototype tool where one watches human and AI-generated movements ‘answering’ the same questions. In doing so, we want to question the nature of human intuition and creativity.

The first research update gathering will be on 14 December 2025, hosted by ICK. At this event, we will share our process and results so far, as well as our plans for the next few months of research. ICK will share insights from their related work with AI and movement, and together we will brainstorm about the artistic and scientific potential of this research.

The True-ing Test research is conducted by:
Amit Palgi – A choreographer and dance artist whose interdisciplinary practice mixes somatic dance with immersive technology; and Joyce den Hertog – A creative coder, technologist, and maker who applies technical knowledge for artistic purposes in dance and theatre.

For more information, contact Francesco Cutillo via email: francescocutillo@ickamsterdam.nl