Performing AI: Labor and Complexity on the Contemporary Stage

This talk focuses on the entanglements between human labor and machine “intelligence” in artistic performance. Indeed, as artificial intelligence in the guise of large-scale, data-driven algorithms that model biologically-conceptualized neural networks rewrite the rules on what constitutes human language, thought and action, this lecture will examine the bodily, mental, and affective work required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts so that these mathematical entities might also be seen to be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and non-human machines. “Performing AI” not only generates new aesthetic problems but also larger questions around how such AI performances reimagine creative labor together with what conception of human beings and society the algorithms that compose neural networks enact.

About the speakers:

Chris Salter is an artist, professor and director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Marc-André Cossette is a Canadian transdisciplinary artist and PhD candidate at Concordia University working on the relation between technology and performing arts using sound, visual, and interaction design.