This is a comment (a long long comment, I am sorry) that I wrote in response to Annie Dorsen's Algorithmic Theater manifesto a few months ago, both Dorsen's original manifesto and my response were published on the Theater Journal blog (http://theatermagazine.org/algorithmic-theater). I am sharing it with you mostly because it is relevant to discussions we are having in class about boundaries, human-ness and the post-human, and also references Primate Cinema (which was presented as part of Audacious Speculations).
Still, because I posted this before encountering much of the scholarship I have read in the past few months, there is a lot I would write differently today. Specifically, I would be more explicit about actual models of post-human put forward by specific theories, particularly Haraway and Barad. Though my larger point is still true to what I believe (that posthuman art making must think with, not against, entities other than human beings, allowing them to affect and change the work) I think I shortchanged the actual scholarship and lost a chance to apply important theoretical models. Anyway, here it is. See you all soon!
Yelena
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Metalogue: Why an Algorithm [i]
In Dorsen’s analysis of her own work, she describes three major traditions that are challenged by Hello Hi There: embodiment as a prerequisite for theater, performance time being limited by the experience of spectatorship, and language as window to consciousness.
An algorithm is, in the simplest sense, a set of instructions; if you could remove the assumption of an original programmer, you could also say that an algorithm is a set of sequential rules. Presumably, it would not be correct to say, as Dorsen does, that the algorithms are observable in a disembodied form in Hello Hi There because they are in fact embodied in at least two ways: first, in the body of the computer that processes these instructions, and second, in the body of language that constitutes the output of the instructions. The algorithms are dramatized by these double bodies, since Hello Hi There puts both the laptops and the language they produce on stage for viewership. I think Dorsen’s point is more that the only bodies onstage are non-human bodies, and it is precisely the lack of human bodies that challenges the notion that theater requires an exchange of energies between a (human) performer and (human) spectator.
Is the absence of human bodies on stage a radical development? I would counter that theater without human actors has a long history, which includes various puppet theater, object theater, and conceptual performance works (Bob Morris’ 1960 falling column jumps to mind). You could even argue that Robert Wilson’s theater, which often equates the value of human bodies to that of objects and stage, is similarly challenging the personhood of the performer. Still, I do think that Hello Hi There is different from many of these predecessors, because it is explicitly about this question of what constitutes personhood.
Dorsen’s manifesto takes issue with the centuries-old tradition of audiences seeing themselves in theater, of looking up to the stage to find a reflection of a unified self and unified society. Dorsen tries to interrupt this by putting onstage a computer-generated event, which can both engage the audience’s reflection and empathy, and simultaneously alienate and expose that empathy. For me this tactic falls into the same trap as much of posthuman discourse, which can be summarized as an effort to avoid a worldview that puts the human being at the center, and instead to radically include plant, animal, geologic, and technologic entities as adjacent or contiguous rather than as subservient in order to formulate new ways to conceptualize and act.
The recurrent snag in some posthuman discourse is that it still relies on the notion of human (as a negative theology, at least). This is evidenced not only by the word “human” still prominent, but more so in that the debate itself is almost entirely practiced by humans, and not by plant, animal, or geological entities. I suppose that technologies—that is, functional entities built by humans—have the best shot at “thinking” with us, and past us, until the very unity of an “us” (us humans, us audience) ceases to cohere. The fusion of the human and technological is not a new idea, and even as it approaches, is not a comfortable one. Decades of science fiction has depicted various tense ways that this might come to pass.Hello Hi There may also be pointing toward such a possibility, or at least toward the stressed and brittle juncture that differentiates “human” from everything else. Still, like most such work, Hello Hi There remains rooted in the division of “us” (the perceivers, thinkers, image-makers, i.e. the creators), and them (the bodies through which we compute, work, and imagine, i.e., the actors). To see if this is actually true, imagine a reverse “Hello Hi There”: two human actors playing to an auditorium of computers. Or better yet, two computers playing to an audience “of their own kind.”
Another point that might support my argument is the effect of the performance (as it actually was done) on its human audience. As Dorsen herself acknowledged, the effect of the piece was not isolating, rather it “…intensified the horizontal relationships between audience members.” It did this because the human audience could consider the technological bodies onstage as fundamentally different, and their own human bodies as being comparatively similar. As much as Hello Hi There may point to a problematic unity of humanness, it also may functionally reinforce this unity.
This reminds me of another recent work that also operationally juxtaposes human and non-human minds and bodies. Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema: Apes as Family is a split- screen film developed with, through, about and/or for groups of primates, scientists, actors and audiences. Mayeri, in co-operation with primatologist Sarah-Jane Vick, observed the preferences of primates to various televised images. Using the images and events primates liked best, Mayeri then made a fictional film featuring human actors dressed in monkey costumes. The completed fiction film was then screened for various audiences of primates. During these screenings, the primates watching the film were also recorded, and this edited recording was added as a second channel to the fiction film. The two films, the original fiction film and the primates watching the original film, were then presented in a two-channel screening for various human audiences. Here, Mayeri managed to budge the human/non-human hierarchy by creating a structure in which non-humans, via their spectatorship, could affect the form of what was created at various levels.
Are the conventions of time in the theater challenged by the algorithmic performers in Hello Hi There? Dorsen’s notion that the algorithm exists before and after the performance is over does not mean that it continues to perform, any more than the text play of Ibsen’s Doll House (a pernicious algorithm of sorts) continues to perform once the actors go home. Similarly, the fact that any one iteration of Hello Hi There can be precisely repeated many times is not, in itself, a challenge; one can argue that, since Hello Hi There is a performance for a live (human) audience, any given performance (even of the same exact material) will necessarily differ, since the audience will experience it differently.
This point about temporality reminds me of the works of Finnish performance maker Tuija Kokkonen, who also made a series of pieces with, about, and for non-humans, focusing on the relationship between their various temporalities. Within one sprawling larger project, her Chronopolitics – III Memo of Time, there was a space where Kokkonen asked audiences to read to a lichen-covered rock. Here the temporality of the performance became complicated, since the performance itself was constituted by the delicate symbiosis of the lichen and the reader, causally linking the (relatively short) time of reading to the (relatively long) duration of moss growing. The relevant point is that the temporal shift was made possible by a parallel shift between the human reader and the vegetal listener as the one who defines time. In introducing these works of Kokkonen and Mayeri, I wish to point to other artworks that place non-humans at the center of the piece, not only as subjects but as agents.
Annie Dorsen’s final point is that algorithmic theater challenges the notion that language is a window to consciousness, and (depending on how you define consciousness) this may be true. It is also important, though, to acknowledge that the role of language in Hello Hi There is crucial, not as a representation of consciousness, but as the process that allows it (the algorithm) to manifest itself. Without language (code), the algorithm would cease to exist and that in this sense, too, language (both the output dialogue of the performance, and the code language of the operational algorithms themselves) continues to drive the event.
Note that, by taking issue with the implications of Dorsen’s manifesto, I am totally supporting her claim that her use of algorithms and technological bodies on stage provokes some of the most pressing questions about what happens during a theatrical event. I am suggesting that the interesting thing about “Hello Hi There” is precisely its seeming failure to displace the temporal and phenomenological knots of theater, despite the fact that it replaces a “living” process with a “programmed” one. It’s funny that, from the few minutes I saw of the excerpt online, the dialogue of the computers makes it apparent that they (or their conversations) are smarter than we are. And somehow I think that this is deeply true.
Does theater require an exchange of energies between a performer and a spectator? Dorsen’s piece posits that it does not. But in the same play, her piece demonstrates that in theater, there is necessarily an exchange, an act of communication, for some observer somewhere. It may be that Hello Hi There is pointing to the complexity that underlies not only algorithms, but communication systems in general. The point is not that the dialogues of Chatbox Left and Chatbox Right reveal our anthropomorphic tendencies, but that language (i.e. communication) persists in the theater, that the two are inseparable, a that all further differences (between humans and non-humans, between competing temporalities, and between readings or “understanding”) flow from this.
[i] The title references Gregory Bateson’s “Metalogue: Why a Swan” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson’s metalogues are written as dialogues between himself and his daughter, which both describe and instantiate an interrogation of knowing. An excerpt:
F: All right, let’s try to analyze what “sort of” means. Let’s take a single sentence and examine it. If I say “the puppet Petroushka is sort of human,” I state a relationship.
D: Between what and what?
F: Between ideas, I think.
D: Not between a puppet and people?
F: No. Between some ideas I have about a puppet and some ideas I have about people.
D: Oh.
F: All right, let’s try to analyze what “sort of” means. Let’s take a single sentence and examine it. If I say “the puppet Petroushka is sort of human,” I state a relationship.
D: Between what and what?
F: Between ideas, I think.
D: Not between a puppet and people?
F: No. Between some ideas I have about a puppet and some ideas I have about people.
D: Oh.
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