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.

What is it like to live collectively with artificial intelligences? In COMMUNE AI, the audience establishes a commune in a digital space and inhabits a specially developed virtual platform. The human participants express political goals, desires, and expectations, while the AIs propose ways to implement them.

How do the AIs handle communal conflicts over money distribution, cleaning schedules, ownership, power dynamics, and jealousy? What new opportunities and risks arise from coexisting with AI systems? How can we reshape the profit-driven and often discriminatory structures of AI? And what contributions can AIs themselves make to these questions?

COMMUNE AI is a work in progress, with various versions of the performance now available—analog, online, and hybrid.

Trailer

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.

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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.