Playing the Other: Confronting More-Than-Human Intelligence Through Performance

Max Dovey discussed projects that involve performance, improvisation and live action role play to confront emergent techno-social configurations within live, embodied and situated contexts.

In the age of social media and big data, collective identities are often discussed in terms of networks, publics, or “neighborhoods of likeness” (Chun, 2018), while theories on “digital subjects” (Goriunova, 2019), “algorithmic imagination” (Finn, 2017) or “phantasmal media” (Harrell, 2013) help us think about the ways these techno-social infrastructures also shape new imaginaries and formats for collective subjectivation.

With the widespread everyday adoption of more and more visually sophisticated technologies based on AI, VR and AR, what critical approaches can help us conceptualise the convergence of the social – with its categories, figures, and movements – and the aesthetic – intended both in terms of increasingly haptic and immersive modes of identification, but also in terms of the poietic modes of political subjectivation called for by theorists like Franco “Bifo” Berardi? How do emerging cultural formats like Instagram face filters, GAN imagery, or blockchain-enabled communities contribute to spread out our increasingly distributed, digitally augmented identities?

With this premise, this online event featured presentations by both critics and artists who work on new media, art, and identity in critical ways.