PROCEDURAL DRAMA

For audience members who had attended the 2011 New York premiere of Hello Hi There at the former P.S. 122—its linoleum hallways and public-school architecture now glossily renovated into Performance Space New York—seeing the piece again figured as a reunion of sorts, albeit a reunion with a beloved...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Artforum international 2023-02, Vol.61 (6)
Main Author: Felton-Dansky, Miriam
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Actors
Algorithms
Audiences
Computers
Literature
Pandemics
Social networks
Speeches
Theater
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Summary:For audience members who had attended the 2011 New York premiere of Hello Hi There at the former P.S. 122—its linoleum hallways and public-school architecture now glossily renovated into Performance Space New York—seeing the piece again figured as a reunion of sorts, albeit a reunion with a beloved friend who does not care that we’ve come to see them or even remember that we’ve met before. Taking inspiration from Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault’s infamous 1971 debate about language and human creativity, as well as from other historic inquiries into the ways technology challenges concepts of humanness, the piece unfolds as a series of exchanges in which the bots draw on vast databases of text, ranging from YouTube commentary about the Chomsky-Foucault debate, to snippets from Hamlet and other works of famous literature, to the hollow botspeak that Siri and Alexa dish up daily. According to Ryan Holsopple, one of Dorsen’s technical collaborators, new programs could theoretically do it, but the piece would be deeply, even if indiscernibly, different. Addressing questions of social and public space directly (though created well before the pandemic), Dorsen’s Spokaoke, part party and part performance, is both a joyful communal event and a meditation on the nature of public speech.
ISSN:1086-7058