Peter Weibel x ChatGPT

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.