Writing Initiatives

While this cyborgian identity rings true for AI embodied performers sporting an earpiece and a phone to receive inputs and a mic; looking at the performers out on the street, a passerby might not make any distinction between a regular person talking on the phone, or even a YouTuber filming video content for reels.

Bissell quotes techno-theorist Donna Haraway from her work Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991): “Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”²

So what experience did this performance truly provide? There are two aspects to this — the experience of the performer, and that of the audience; in most cases a passerby on the street.

While in ‘The Merge’, the audience felt mildly intrigued and went along with a curious occurring on a bustling street (in this video, we see performer Vibhinna Ramdev engaging with a car and its driver on the street), the effect was much stronger at the site-specific work under the Wheeler Road Flyover.

Bengaluru Flyover Saga, was specifically designed with the intention of generating interaction from passersby on issues of urban mobility and ways of making the city easier to navigate in the face of its huge traffic problem.

Here, the performer as a ‘cyborgian virtual creature’, speaking obscurely in a public space, mostly among people who usually occupied the space and didn’t necessarily speak the language, created a very unusual atmosphere, generating an unexpected response. These residents and regulars were either engaged by the bizarreness of the events, or overwhelmed by the attention given to them and their space. This opened up an unconventional space where they felt comfortable sharing their life stories and opinions on concerns of mobility, such as cycling and walking, which they might have otherwise been too shy or wary to discuss.

In this particular instance, a man gets inspired and animatedly gestures while the performance is going on, and goes on to share his life story.

‘The Merge’, on the other hand, was a less targeted exercise in terms of audience interaction, and more of an experiment with technology, duration, and the performing body. One of the four performers in ‘The Merge’, contemporary dancer Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy therefore considered this a purely intellectual exercise for the studio and YouTube audience (who knew what it was). They could see the studio setup with multiple screens, text generation, and the live video projected on another screen. They were curious about how the text was generated, how ‘real time’ it was, and whether it could immediately be adapted to what the performer did, whether it was the latest version, etc. He felt that, “as a piece of art, this was very shallow for an audience as it was an out-of-context experience for a passerby.”

This ‘out of context’ experiences ranged from the absolute nonsensical and bizarre (performer Suhasini tries to converse with a completely baffled passerby using only numbers) to a seemingly intelligent conversation that they could contribute to (passerby conversing with performer Suhasini about downloading one’s mind into a computer).

Shivaswamy says: “As a performer, it was really intriguing to observe how the body and the mind engage with the information. The act of repeating the words that this robotic voice constantly gave us, got to a point of madness for me. As a dancer, the body took over and seeing actors playing with words was amazing.” This was an interesting contrast in observing how the body of a dancer tended towards silence, and the interplay between stillness and movement, almost as if the words themselves were secondary and beyond a point, meaningless (See performer Deepak sitting comfortably among a group of labourers having lunch).

On the other hand, as an actor who prefers text, I attempted to bring multiple meanings to the text in real time while engaging with people and objects (performer Suhasini engages with elements found in an alleyway).

However, the idea of repetition reaching a state of madness was a common thread for both. Sometimes the generated thoughts themselves were repetitive, and created a loop as seen in here, where performer Suhasini gets frantic, saying ‘this woman needs help’. Moments such as this really brought out the irony of the performance. Was the performer really the one who needed help?

What makes the performer feel comfortable behaving this way on the street?

The idea of being in a kind of virtual environment, which Margaret Morse describes as “liminal realms of transformation, outside of the world of social limits and constraints – not entirely imaginary, or entirely real, animate, but neither living nor dead, a subjunctive realm, wherein events happen in effect but not actually.”³

In my experience as a performer, we had entered the world Morse describes, a ‘virtual’ fictional world: it felt like we were in a simulated world, where there was  no physical, emotional or psychological danger, either from the vehicles on the road or curious passersby wanting to engage. The danger of course, was very much real. But we didn’t feel it. Was this because thoughts coming from elsewhere removed our primal instincts of fear, protection, fight, and flight? Was a part of our brain turned off, because of the artificial input of thoughts?

Or did we see ourselves as a version that is invincible, and that could approach anyone’s personal space because of the prostheses — the camera, the earphones, the phone that had augmented us. It felt like we were somehow not responsible for our actions, because we were not really ourselves.

Angela Waidmann, who acted in the German version of ‘The Merge’, Mensh am Draht, felt: “The only thing we knew was we know nothing.”

What then, is the aim of such AI embodied performance, beyond experimentation? As the AI assistant puts it, “The aim is not to provoke for the sake of provoking but to initiate conversation, foster empathy, and perhaps kindle the will to bring about change in our society. Art in such a context becomes more than entertainment — it becomes a medium of societal expression and a catalyst for societal transformation.”

At the end we remain with more questions than answers: Is it the performer and their skill that brings about the response from the people? Is it the text or the combined effect of “the virtual reality space” the performance creates? Who is in control and holds power — the performer, the AI generative tool, the generator, or the audience? How susceptible to manipulation is each of these bodies in the ‘audience’?

More pressingly, this performance deliberated on the influence of AI on our thoughts, and in turn our bodies. As our thoughts get more influenced by AI every day, how do our bodies deal with it, individually and collectively?