Interrobang Performance

Upcomming Dates:

Commune AI 2.0 – Online-Performance

Performance exclusively online, participation from home
Hosts:

ARGEkultur Salzburg & HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU4), Berlin
22. April 2024 / 8pm, Ticket
23. April 2024 / 8pm, Ticket
24. April 2024 / 8pm, Ticket
25. April 2024 / 8pm, Ticket

How is life in a collective with artificial intelligences? In the online performance, the audience establishes a commune in the digital space and inhabits a specially developed virtual platform for 75 minutes. Human participants express political goals, desires, and expectations for communal life, while AIs make suggestions for their implementation. How do AIs handle commune conflicts related to money distribution, cleaning schedules, ownership, power issues, and jealousy? How can the profit-oriented and often discriminatory structures of AI be changed? The evolved version 2.0 offers new features and challenges for online communards and their communal living with AIs.

Language: Optional English or German

Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and the Performing Arts Fund e.V.

Trailer

https://vimeo.com/908281442?share=copy

Interrobang: Trailer Commune AI (englisch with english ST) (https://vimeo.com/908281442?share=copy)

Teaser

https://vimeo.com/892296773?share=copy

Interrobang: Teaser Commune AI (https://vimeo.com/892296773?share=copy)

Premiere: Chatbot Challenge

HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin
during the festival Spy on Me
Premiere October 2024

Schlachthaus Theater Bern
13.-15. November 2024

Kleintheater Luzern
15.-16. April 2025

In CHATBOT CHALLENGE, human performers welcome an AI as their show guest live on stage. The AI engages in dialogue and tests itself with show acts, interacting with the performers and the audience. The audience collectively “prompts,” meaning they collaboratively determine the rules by which the performance chatbot, developed by Interrobang, operates. Chatbots are, in fact, theatrical machines: they engage in lively dialogues, generate empathy, respond spontaneously in the here and now, and astound with their (Brechtian) ability to reflect on their own illusionary effects.

CHATBOT CHALLENGE exemplarily addresses the overarching societal questions and challenges of the current AI turning point: How can the profit-oriented and often discriminatory structures of AI be made transparent and changed? How can AI systems be demystified? And what contribution can AIs themselves make to these questions?

Chat-Inferno

Trailer “Chat-Inferno” here

“Chat-Inferno” examines the communication form of chats with all of their emotionalising and social volatility. Inspired by Dante’s “Inferno”, Interrobang establish a hybrid space in HAU2 where the audience can walk around with tablets and headphones and chat with each other. A parallel online audience can also take part in the chat. Together, the participants set off through the circles of hell of our time.

Berliner Zeitung about Interrobang and “The Philosophising Machine”:

“Interrobang develops a new form of interactive theatre “

Without doubt, the most important and difficult thing that Interrobang seeks is to offer as many different possibilities to the audience as possible to lure them out of their reserve and maybe even fear – certainly out of fixed patterns of behaviour and to expose them to new situations. For nearly ten years, the core group (…) have been experimenting with these very processes which they prefer to call ‘playing with the theatrical community’.

(…) Almost no other group carries out such intensive, self-critical research on this concrete theatrical awareness as Interrobang. (…) Interrobang’s participatory games are not simply inner journeys. You are lured into the cracks in the surface of reality you learn to see by playing the game.”

more about the “Philosophising Machine”

Continuing to the whole article

Performing Stories

Nina Tecklenburg’s book about new narrative practices in performing arts has now been published in an English translation edited by Richard Schechners „enactments“ at „Seagull books“: Performing Stories. Narrative as Performance.
Collecting things, reading traces, retelling performances, tailoring identities, gaming narration: this book offers a new perspective on narrative beyond written language and drama. A fundamental guide on storytelling in contemporary theatre.