NEWS
Next dates:
Premiere: Chatbot Challenge
Chatbots are theatrical machines: they engage in lively dialogues, take on roles, and express and evoke emotions.
In CHATBOT CHALLENGE, two performers and a creative coder share the stage with chatbots and other AI systems. They explore the question: How much theater is in AI, and how much AI-theater have we already internalized? Starting from the core situation of theater – a live performance in front of an audience – the piece becomes an intimate encounter with global AI systems, their potential, and their strategies of deception. What happens when AI systems gain access to video, sound, stage, lighting, the bodies of the performers, and the reactions of the audience? Are chatbots the better performers? And how much work goes into their roles?
CHATBOT CHALLENGE explores the big societal questions and challenges brought about by the current rise of AI. It looks into the underlying systems that create AI, questioning how the profit-driven and often biased structures can be changed. How can we reveal and address the biases in AI systems? And how can AIs themselves contribute to answering these questions?
moreCommune AI 2.0 – Online-Performance
past events
HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU4), Berlin & ARGEkultur Salzburg & Kleintheater Luzern
Online-Premiere: 01. November at 8pm, on other days at 6pm and 9pm
01 - 05 November 2023
Errorrama Festival/ Kleintheater Luzern & HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU4), Berlin & Kana Theater Stettin
23 - 24 February 2024
ARGEkultur Salzburg & HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU4), Berlin
22 - 25 April 2024
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? 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
Teaser
moreND about “Commune AI”
Shared Living at a Non-Place – In the Online Performance “Commune AI”, the Interrobang Collective Explores Coexistence Between Humans and Technology
(…) “Commune AI” reveals the shortcomings of artificial intelligence. While the human housemates exchange ideas about the flaws in the images, the AI itself cannot be critiqued. Even playing spin the bottle with AI isn’t fun, and it doesn’t even bother to create a cleaning schedule. However, GPT-5 excels as a writer. 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. As with other AI-generated content, there’s no way to revise the words in the manifesto. 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. It feels a bit too good to be true.
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.”
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.