ARGEkultur Salzburg
during the festival „Science Meets Fiction“
26. – 27. September 2023
06:00-10:00pm

On September 26th at 7:00 PM, a streamed discussion with Till Müller-Klug (Interrobang) and Jessica Heesen on the topic of “Digital Afterlife” will take place.

PHILOSOPHISING MACHINE ONLINE is an artificial intelligence that brings dead thinkers back to life. With headphones and the push of a button, the online audience can enter into a lively dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Bloch and others and renegotiate their central themes for the present: Freedom, dissidence, otherness, censorship, social utopia, hope – in 20th-century Europe, these concepts were bargaining chips in postwar philosophy shaped by wartime experiences. Today, against the backdrop of current political developments, they unfold a new relevance.

Additionally to the online -version there is also an analogue version of the THE PHILOSOPHISING MACHINE.

HAU 4 Hebbel am Ufer Berlin & ARGEkultur Salzburg & Kleintheater Luzern
01. – 05. November 2023
Premiere: 01. November, 8pm
03.11./ 04.11./ 05.11., each 6pm and 9pm

Errorrama Festival/ Kleintheater Luzern & HAU4
23. Februar 2024

Werk X Wien & ARGEkultur Salzburg & HAU4
from 22. April 2024

What is it like living in a collective with Artificial Intelligences? In the online performance COMMUNE AI, the audience establishes a commune in the digital space and inhabits a specially developed virtual platform for two hours. In various game rounds, participants get to know each other and experiment with new hybrid forms of living and community. Human players express their desires, preferences, expectations, political goals, and AI systems make concrete suggestions for their joint implementation. How do the AI systems handle typical commune conflicts related to money distribution, cleaning schedules, power dynamics, and jealousy? What new possibilities and risks arise from the coexistence of humans and AI systems? How can the profit-driven and often discriminatory structures of AI be made transparent and changed? And what contributions can AI systems themselves make to these questions?

Language: English or German

Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.

Premiere Autumn 2024 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer

In CHATBOT DIRECTOR, the audience can live co-create, collaboratively “prompt”, test and question possible theater and future scenarios with artificial intelligence – each evening new and different. In playful exchange with performers and a performance chatbot specially developed and programmed by Interrobang, scenic futures are created on the topics of theater, AI, politics and communities. Unlike in everyday chatbot use, the audience in CHATBOT DIRECTOR can collectively “prompt”, i.e. collectively co-determine in the theater space the rules according to which the performance chatbot operates.These ethical codes of behavior are then tested on and with the performers in various play and conflict situations and successively developed further. In the play scenes, the performance chatbot has access to the entire theater machinery of sound, lighting, stage and video. Which feedback loops are triggered and what happens when the artificial theater intelligence gets out of control?

CHATBOT DIRECTOR exemplarily negotiates the overall social questions and challenges of the current AI-age.

HAU Hebbel am Ufer
during the festival “Spy on me #4” at HAU2 and HAU4
Premiere 30. September 2022
further shows: 01.-03. October 2022

“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.

more

MetaLab Harvard & FU Berlin
27. September 2023, 2:00pm online
Registration

One of the most fascinating aspects of the newest generation of chatbots seems to lie in an increased level of theatricality: self-learning machines such as ChatGPT impress with their ability to engage in vivid dialogue, to create empathy, to (re)act spontaneously, and to charm by critically self-reflecting on the “artificial” nature of their real effects. Meanwhile, ChatGPT users immerse themselves in giving directions – prompts – and revel, mostly also self-critically, in the suspension of disbelief created by the AI. Although playing with AIs on stage is as old as computer technology itself, the emergence of the latest AI systems not only brings new technical possibilities for the performing arts but also raises the question of how much ’theater’ is inherent in AIs. It prompts us to ask how theater and performance change in the context of digital culture and how theater, as both a social and artistic/artificial event, can reflect the hidden mechanisms and impact of the latest digital technologies on our social lives. The lecture addresses these issues by giving insights into past works and current rehearsal processes of Interrobang.

“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

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.