Theatre dialogues with machines

Abstract

This article highlights artistic strategies that deal with algorithms, machines, and the interplay between humans and machines in the context of theatre. It is written from the perspective of a theatre practitioner and researcher, and focuses on the question of what artistic strategies can be used to express the interplay of humans and machines at this specific point in history and technological progress. The article draws on two historical references, the concept of a rule-based theatre in pre-modern theatre and strategies to address the android in the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It identifies features of a ‘cyborg art’ and counterposes them to more traditional humanistic approaches, in order to identify modern artistic strategies in theatre, that deal with human–machine interaction. It then raises the question of whether these strategies need to be expanded or reinvented to accommodate the latest developments in AI, identifying three new qualities of concurrent machines, their ability to ‘hallucinate‘, their ‘softness’ and their implicit message ‘meaning is improbable‘. In the last section I will describe own approaches to stage artificial intelligence using improvisational theatre ‘Almost Human‘ (2019) and ‘The Answering Machine’ (ongoing) and address basic problems of how we can represent digital machines on a stage.