On Algorithmic Theatre

A summary: Dorsen, Annie. “On Algorithmic Theatre”. In Digital Dramaturgies. Vol 42, Issue 2 (2012). Available on: http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf

Annie Dorsen: “It seems to me crucially important to tae time to reflect on how we are working together, algorithms and people.”

p. 1-2

Algorithm: a series of concrete mathematical steps that allow computers “to decide stuff,” in the words of Kevin Slavin. Algorithms start with a data set, and through a progression of specific transformations, they turn inputs into outputs. In this way, given a relatively small number of rules, they can produce a wide variety of results.

Algorithmic theatre: is created by the algorithms themselves, and is not particularly concerned with forms of representation. It conforms to familiar modes of reception: timebased, live, intended for viewing as a linear experience before an audience who views the work in its entirety, from beginning to end. And though algorithms are not, obviously, conscious living beings, they do evoke something like minds at work. They produce thought, they make decisions, they act. Thus, algorithmic theatre should be understood as theatre, and not as “theatrical installation”. Nevertheless, algorithmic theater challenges the abovementioned “initial axioms” of theatre: embodiment, ephemerality, and most significantly, language as a representation of subjectivity.

p. 2

Embodyment/presence: The presence of a human body on stage that is is, does or shows and the energetic connetion between performer and audience are for thousands of years undisputed features of theatre.

Algorithmic theatre, however, dispenses with —or at least severely limits the role of— humans onstage. The program is the performer. Algorithmic performance creates an asymmetric relationship, in which the human spectator confronts something that can’t confront her back. The spectator is left radically alone. This is why I think of these works as anti-esoteric. Audience members may feel an energetic transfer or they may get swept up and absorbed – or they may not. But if they do, they have to acknowledge that it’s a feeling of their own making, a trick of their own brains, and there is no objective reality to the impression of communion or contact.

Ephimerality: Underlying the principle of performance as ephemeral is a corollary belief that the secret subject of all theatre is the passage of time – and in particular the decay of bodies, which is to say, mortality. Algorithmic performance complicates this notion. For one thing, algorithms are, one could say, immortal. Though an algorithmic performance is thus literally transient, each and every performance is potentially reproducible down to the last detail. The audience’s temporal engagement with that expression may be singular, and will pass; but the performance onstage is immune and indifferent to that disappearance. Algorithmic theatre may shift our understanding of what present tense means in the first place.

p. 4

Representation of consciousness through language: In algorithmic performance production of language is disconnected from consciousness. Though I wrote above that the programs produce text and make decisions and do all kinds of things, they have no inherent interiority or desire to communicate from the stage; they have no thoughts that aren’t spoken or acted upon. —> seeing through language to the thought “beneath,” is revealed to be an act of imagination on the part of the listener —> Untethering speech from consciousness destabilizes our habitual trust of language as a means of argument, description, revelation, persuasion

p. 5

We live in a world in which the question of agency is highly disputed, in which our access to choice is circumscribed by the framing of political discourse, by the simultaneous cornucopia and contraction of “options” in our consumer paradise, and, indeed, by algorithms, which filter, consolidate and display certain possibilities while rendering all others invisible.

We have already given over large areas of decision-making to algorithms, and we have already (mostly) agreed to participate in the conversion of our lives into data, which algorithms will use. Algorithmic theatre makes their functioning available for observation and contemplation, so that we may begin to understand not only how they work, but how we work with them.