SMARTPHONOCRACY invites you to discover your place in a new AI polis. This interactive installation brings together ancient ideas of democracy and the technologies of the present. Using your own smartphone, you log in via QR code and become part of a digital game of questions: Where does Western democracy stand today? How do you position yourself politically, economically, and socially? Will we still be voting in the future—or will our choices already have been calculated?

How does the hidden logic of AI systems change our world? Interrobang hacks the theatre’s black box to shed light on the darkness of AI boxes. Between projections, strings, and laser lines, the audience itself becomes “tokens” in an analog neural network. Dare to enter our black box and experience how machine decisions connect, isolate, or transform us. Play the system before it plays you!

AI DEMOCRACY transforms the stage into a digital polis: political bots, deepfakes and AI election campaigns encounter ancient decision-making processes. Performers, audience and a creative coder come together in a live experiment about manipulation, participation and the future of democracy.

AI DEMOCRACY, can be performed in either German or English.

But here, art is doing what art should do. It shows how the digital world of AI functions and makes the first attempts to utilize it for theater (…).

The performer lends her body to a chatbot, attempting to serve as a bridge for a physical presence that artificial intelligence doesn’t have. (…) Hilarious effects emerge as the AI tries to find ways into human emotionality.
(…) The idea behind trying to make theater with AI is quite simple. Machines simulate emotions, but it’s the audience that feels them. In acting, something similar often happens. Now, however, humans are interacting with machines in a way that will change themselves.

Continue to “Chatbot Challenge”

Shared Living at a Non-Place – In the Online Performance “Commune AI”, the Interrobang Collective Explores Coexistence Between Humans and Technology

(…) With just a few keywords, the AI quickly crafts a “communal manifesto.” It includes the desire for community, wishes for individual space, and climate consciousness. [… ] Fortunately, the concept of a network that mutually supports each other sounds genuinely appealing. Later, participants will have to take a stance on the topic of ownership, and at that point, there will be an opportunity to remedy social inequalities in an almost absurdly simple way.

Continue to „Commune AI“

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“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”

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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.