{"title":"Performativity without theatricality: experiments at the limit of staging AI","authors":"Douglas Eacho","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2210989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2210989","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Referencing participant observation in a research-creation lab devoted to performance and artificial intelligence (AI), this article summarizes and intervenes within two discourses surrounding the performativity of computation. I first summarize the media-theoretical debate over whether or not electronic computation counts as what J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida defined as ‘performative’. This turns out to be a divide over the politics of theoretical analysis, and as such these positions can be synthesized together. Relying on Samuel Weber’s concept of ‘theatricality’, I set out a novel proposal for understanding computation as representing a limit of performativity without theatricality. Secondly, I review the experiments conducted with staging recent machine-learning models within the University of Toronto’s BMO Lab. A scholarly tradition distinct from the above has turned to a ‘metaphysical performativity’, describing all reality as performatively animate rather than representational and inert; some have pointed to recent AI developments as a demonstration of the truth of this view. I dissent, with evidence from the aesthetic experience of watching AI performance. Finally, I critique the ideology implicit in theories that take the appearance of AI animacy as a model for social reality.","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"1 1","pages":"20 - 36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83102235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sensing performance: from Balinese character to Japanese androids","authors":"Chris Salter, T. Ikegami","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2207966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2207966","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines recent work in machine performance in the context of an ‘Artificial Life’ research lab, linking the disciplines of visual anthropology, cybernetics, Artificial Life and Deep Learning-based artificial intelligence with the increasing interest in deploying ‘intelligent machines’ in artistic performance settings. As recent explorations of ‘machine vision’ in robotics demonstrate, cameras can be understood as instruments of capture and representation which no longer are simply recorders of images whose meanings are to be unlocked by human interpreters. Moving across a range of performative contexts, from anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s ethnographic work in Bali to experiments with an autonomous android in the Japanese lab, the article explores the camera as a cybernetically influenced sensing device that generates complex feedback loops between entities and their spatio-temporal environments. How does the camera as a sensing device enact a kind of visual performativity whereby technologically mediated subjects and selves are not recorded but, in effect, produced through interactive circuits, instruments and computational technologies? How might models of perception and observation that emerge from the social and natural sciences shape new ideas about the entangling of computational and real bodies spaces in the emerging practices of performance design?","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"52 1","pages":"91 - 111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84336616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital choreographies: the body as a site for gestural mapping","authors":"Antonio Peña","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2210988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2210988","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is a hybrid reflection on the potential of digital capture to reveal spatio-temporal choreographic negotiations between body and built environment. Acknowledging a lack of engagement within environments that account for the expressive potential of the body and which constrain, dictate and industrialize it, with the proposed somatic research we set out to conduct an observation of the performance of body behavior in the way we interact with a seminal design object: a chair. Thus, the essay is a hybrid observation of bodily performances within quotidian environments that extends choreographic practice and knowledge beyond traditional choreographic contexts to account for the expressive, playful possibilities of the sentient body. The research fluctuates between practices of choreography and design staged in the scenographic landscape of digital photography and digital animation software to map the choreo-mediation between body and object: what is performed by the body in order to ‘interact’ with the proposed choreographic frameworks of a chair. A non-linear, digital, self-ethnographic approach presents two multi-sited studies to analyze this choreomediation: from stop-motion capture of a body performing negotiations with a chair to a digital transcription as a visual mapping of a three-dimensional self-avatar, performing the techniques of sitting.","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"60 1","pages":"37 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84607886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peter Weibel x ChatGPT","authors":"Lawrence Wallen","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2208463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2208463","url":null,"abstract":"Posed with the challenge to write on influential design for this special double issue of Theatre and Performance Design entitled ‘On Capture’, I decided to fuse the launch and widespread adoption of the public-facing language-based artificial intelligence-driven chatbot named Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) with the passing of pre-eminent media theorist, artist, curator and AI advocate and critic Peter Weibel. As a result, this article explores Weibel’s work on capture through an interview I conducted with ChatGPT, tempered by some of the author’s observations and fact-checking. My encounters with Peter Weibel, first as a student in the mid-1980s at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, at Ars Electronica in Linz and later as a guest artist at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM), were brief but influential and provided a context for writing this article. Interestingly, while ChatGPT knew much about Peter Weibel, it failed to realise that he passed away on 1 March 2023 in Karlsruhe and it was inaccurate regarding what Weibel published, where, when and by whom. Having said that, ChatGPT was, at the time of writing this article, only four months old and prone to inventing things or at least mixing them up. I began by asking ChatGPT general questions about Weibel’s life and work, initially focusing on his relationship with Joseph Beuys. Peter Weibel, born in Odessa in 1944, was a pre-eminent European media theorist, curator and artist who took over the direction of the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in 1999 from Prof. Hans Peter Schwarz after Schwarz was appointed Rector at the University of the Arts Zurich in the same year. From 1964 to 1969, Weibel studied under and was an assistant to Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ ideas of art as a social and political change tool influenced Weibel’s future direction in examining the intersection of art, politics and technology. Whereas Beuys went on to politically underpin German art in the late twentieth century, arguably, Weibel’s most significant contribution was to construct a framework to understand and engage with the emergence of digital technologies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through collaboration, curation, text and artistic practice, Weibel’s work underwrites some of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. In the early 1970s, Weibel began experimenting with video and multimedia installations, creating works that explored the possibilities of new technologies and their relationship to human perception and consciousness, collaborating with artists such as Nam June Paik and Laurie Anderson.","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"23 1","pages":"120 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82176502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editors’ introduction","authors":"T. Brejzek, Jane Collins","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2210992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2210992","url":null,"abstract":"Chris Salter, Guest Editor of this special double issue of Theatre and Performance Design, has long observed and analysed the ‘entanglement’ of technology and performance histories and practices (Salter 2010) and made visible the degree of (invisible) surveillance with which ‘sensing machines’ have infiltrated our daily work and life (Salter 2022). In the call for ‘On Capture’, Salter again focussed on surveillance, yet this time with a focus on performative bodily and scenographic practices and the way in which artists interpret and realise ‘capture’ on the stage and in the studio, and how key parameters of performance (body, time, space) are represented, altered and critiqued through the encoding and decoding of data in live and mediated performance. The timeliness of this issue is also its urgency. As relentless reports on the rapid development and expansion of the properties of publicfacing artificial intelligence (AI) systems unfold, an ambivalence towards our fascination with technology comes to the fore. Is the deliberate slowing down of AI research and development justified to establish ethical strategies to deal with its purported limitless knowledge production and communication, as some suggest? Is a certain techno-pessimism the natural consequence of being confronted with a technology that may erase us? On the other hand, rather than dominate or erase, the call by psychologists and neurobiologists for AI to develop so-called ‘hot’ cognition (Cuzzolin et al. 2020) – that is, to understand and react to a person’s thinking, including the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM) – may just be beginning to be answered by the most recent research. ToM denotes a person’s ability to take another person’s perspective in communication, and whether or not AI has ToM is hotly disputed right now (Whang 2023). If, however, an AI system is equipped with ToM, it not only will understand humans’ thinking but will also be able to understand that of another, similar AI system. This will mean robot-to-robot performances, as well as human and robot ones, will be able to not only simulate ToM and related qualities such as empathy but will actually embody these in real time, opening up myriad perspectives and concerns for artists at the same time. In line with the above thoughts, the responses to Salter’s call by practitioners and theorists demonstrate a deep engagement with creating new (and different) relationships and new (and different) production and reception aesthetics forged from the confrontation between the physical body and binary data. The depersonalisation of the actor’s body, evoked since Kleist and Maeterlinck and revisited by Craig in his concept of the Übermarionette, and its subsequent re-personalisation in a ‘datafied’ theatrical environment and, with it, the processes of de-theatricalisation and re-theatricalisation of the stage are some of the aspects prevalent in this issue. These deconstruct and redefine, often in experimental settings, key iss","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"41 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78839040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Real-time lighting design: a pioneer, a work, and a collaboration","authors":"Alexandre Saunier","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2211418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2211418","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article proposes three stories that exemplify different metaphors, mechanics, and practices of real-time lighting design. Starting with the example of cybernetician Gordon Pask’s Musicolour, the article proposes a cybernetic-based model of control that favors principles of human–machine co-operation. Then, the analysis of the collaboration between a lighting designer and a multimedia artist illustrates the need for and challenges of radical interdisciplinarity during the production of a stage performance. Finally, the description of a contemporary multimedia installation demonstrates the principles of an aesthetic of lighting grounded in machine-based behaviors. Through those three stories, this article aims to initiate a discussion on the hybridization of lighting with real-time computing, a process that significantly transforms the practice of artists and lighting designers but remains understudied.","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"22 1","pages":"74 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73222767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kerala International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS) 2023","authors":"Richard Allen","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2207964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2207964","url":null,"abstract":"The sound of drums could be heard drifting amongst the trees, rivers and humidity of the beautiful campus of the School of Drama and Fine Arts, University of Calicut, Kerala. The sound was a calling, a gathering of students and teachers, practitioners and pedagogues to join together for the inaugural International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS) between 1 and 5 February 2023. As the participants are drawn towards the Prof. Ramanujan Studio Theatre at the edge of the campus, the source of the drumming is revealed: it is the Panchavadyam played by the students of Kerala Kalamandalam. The sound could be felt in the belly and the throat; it was so loud that it shook through the body, moving it whilst standing still. The banner of the festival was unveiled, the theatre fi lled and there was a buzz of excitement. The open auditorium (the stage and space for the audience blend with open entrances and exits to the outside) was suddenly packed with students from all over the world. When the drumming stopped there was a ringing in the ears and through the body. It was a fi tting introduction to a festival that would be lifted and carried on the energy of, and centred on, the students and their work. The campus itself was transformed by the students, with large pieces of theatrical scenogra-phy, light trails and wall paintings adorning the buildings and trees. The festival was a collaboration between the host school and the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFOK) curated by Professor Balakrishnan Ananthakrishnan, Mr Deepan Sivaraman and Professor Anuradha Kapur under the curational theme ‘ Humanity Must Unite ’ . The concept of the programme was to present, share and collaborate around pertinent issues in theatre and performance teaching practices, curriculums and pedagogy from a progressive perspective. Teachers, students and practitioners were invited from international institutions to consider their practices and process with an orientation to theatre pedagogy. The programme, brilliantly conceived and delivered by a partnership of universities, 1 includes teaching demonstrations, seminars, expert practitioner talks, workshops, a Kathakali performance of Mazha","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"2 3 1","pages":"112 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83401543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tracking and using heart rate data in live performance: reflections on ‘The Hairs of Your Head Are Numbered’","authors":"Chris Kondek","doi":"10.1080/23322551.2023.2209456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2023.2209456","url":null,"abstract":"The space is dark. The audience enters and sits around a small raised stage in the center of the room. Video screens surround the space displaying uplifting slogans. The four performers approach audience members and gently take their hand. They ask if they can take their pulse. With their pulse taken, the audience member is then given a metronome. Their heartbeat per minute is set and the metronome is placed on the stage. The space is silent except for the syncopated ticking of 20 metronomes, the heartbeats of the audience. The audience listens.","PeriodicalId":37207,"journal":{"name":"Theatre and Performance Design","volume":"161 1","pages":"6 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76633572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
