compudanzas is a project instigated by sejo. The site runs in Spanish and English side by side, dates everything in the Holocene calendar (this year is written 12026), and dedicates all of it to the public domain. Its main line is the qiudanz technique: a movement practice built on the computational transformation of minimalist movement sequences. Only mode 1 has actually been developed, and its vocabulary holds three moves. IN, written as a plus sign, joins the palms away from the trunk and brings them back to it. DEH, written as a minus sign, crosses and uncrosses the forearms. SHOW, written as a period, offers one open palm to the person opposite. The first move in a sequence is the head, the last is the tail. The hinge of the whole thing is this: those three move names are also the names of three operations. DEH means remove the head of the sequence. IN means append whatever move follows it as the new tail. SHOW means perform the entire current sequence, and hand the turn over. A string of moves is therefore simultaneously a dance and a program for rewriting dances.

Clear out the nearest look-alike first. Unplugged computer science is already construct. That pedagogy has been teaching sorting and binary with cards, string and lines of children since the late nineties; it has textbooks, curriculum standards, translations. Its beauty is real, but it is the beauty of construct, because it uses the body to explain the machine, and the measure of success is how faithfully the body reproduces what silicon does. The same goes for live coding and algorave, which by now have a manifesto, a community and an annual conference, and for dance-and-technology, which has its own lineage and toolchain. If the value of qiudanz were "demonstrating a Turing machine with your body," this entry should not exist.

The difference is not in appearance. It is in which layer the chisel lands on. The founding move of computer science is itself an extremely deep chisel: lift the process off the matter that carries it, so that the same computation on an abacus, on relays and on silicon counts as the same computation. That cut worked so well that we no longer register it as a cut. But it left something behind. Everything about a computation that concerns whose body did it, how long it took, and whether the people present agreed that the last move counted was ruled irrelevant. Silicon's superiority is precisely that it deletes this layer most cleanly. compudanzas reinstalls the deleted half and makes it the medium. The qiudanz moves are deliberately not rigidly defined: a move is valid because the people in the room agree it is. How long a sequence can grow depends on the memory and stamina of whoever is holding it. The state of the machine is stored in a person and can slip at any moment. sejo puts the principle bluntly himself — let go of the illusion of control.

The consequences are concrete enough to read off the workshop notes. Across four small online workshops, the hardest operation to learn was DEH, "remove the first element of the sequence"; sejo writes that the way we are used to organising movement makes deleting from the head strangely difficult. A second finding matters more. Because instructions and moves share names, participants instinctively perform the instruction sequence they are given as if it were the movement sequence to dance. He warned them in advance, and then wrote that it is important for the "mistake" to happen, because it reveals the core of the technique. In silicon that confusion is exactly what the fetch–execute boundary exists to destroy, the line the von Neumann architecture polices most carefully. Here it is not a bug, it is the entire pleasure: in his words, one can dance a set of instructions. Then there is the target game — start from a given sequence, hold a target sequence in mind, apply transformations until you arrive. The rules are followed by one more line: it might be even more fun not to arrive directly. A formal system that could have been scored on efficiency alone has efficiency explicitly cancelled.

The remainder is still alive because no name catches it. Unplugged pedagogy is wrong: it is measured by fidelity to the machine, and here the machine is not the target. Live coding is wrong: it presumes a machine executing and a person writing, and here nothing is executing anything. Dance is wrong — participants report over and over that the hard part is unlearning choreographic habit, because flow, phrasing and poetics do nothing inside these rules. Performance art is wrong too: the main output is an online workshop with three to five people in it, released into the public domain, with no gallery and no edition numbers. Even permacomputing does not hold it. viznut's own 2021 update files compudanzas under projects with "visions that detach computing from all utilitarian purposes," which describes a gap rather than supplying a name.

Why seeing it now matters more than later: the naming pressure has started, and it is dated. June 2025, ALGOPOÉTICA in Madrid. September 2025, a workshop at the Alpaca conference on Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts. November 2025, Code as Critique at NIAS in Amsterdam. Each of those venues arrives with a vocabulary ready to absorb this — algorithmic pattern, critical computing, decomputing. Once the absorption completes, the workshop can be taught from a handout, and a handout does not have to carry the risk that the room disagrees about whether the last move counted. Right now the risk is still there. The technical roadmap is also unfinished by its own admission: four modes sized by vocabulary at two, four, eight and sixteen moves, with a question mark after the fourth, and only the first ever built. sejo has also given the technique a provenance. The txiemonks are a group committed to preserving computer science beyond electronics and industrial civilisation, who use qiudanz for folk and post-collapse dances — no props needed, performable by small groups regardless of age or physical capability. Their description ends like this: they once knew how to handle, design and repair electronic computers, but eventually all of them broke down. Something that only makes complete sense after the machines break cannot be measured by present-day usefulness, which is exactly why it still has no name.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics