Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-17T06:26:40.239Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Performing AI

Labor and Complexity on the Contemporary Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2024

Marc-André Cossette  and
Chris Salter Open the ORCID record for Chris Salter [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

“Performing AI” raises new questions about creative labor. Might the mathematical entities called neural networks that constitute much contemporary AI research be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and nonhuman machines? What human societal models do neural networks enact? What bodily, mental, and affective work is required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts?

Type
Special Issue Still Exhausted: Labor, Digital Technologies, and the Performing Arts
Information
TDR , Volume 68 , Issue 1: Still Exhausted: Labor, Digital Technologies, and the Performing Arts , March 2024 , pp. 70 - 86
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press for Tisch School of the Arts/NYU

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Electronica, Ars. 2022. “4D Box/SH4DOW – An AI Performance in 3D.” ars.electronica.art/planetb/en/4d-box-sh4d0w/#:∼:text=SH4D0W%20is%20the%20first%20performing,intelligence%20creation%20as%20the%20protagonistGoogle Scholar
Audry, Sofian. 2021. Art in the Age of Machine Learning. The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arseneault-Gagnon, Myriam. 2019. Personal interview with authors, Montreal, 26 January.Google Scholar
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford Clarendon.Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 3:801–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland. (1963) 1981. “Literature and Metalanguage.” In Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, 97–99. Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, and Saltz, David Z.. 2015. Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field. University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bial, Henry. 2004. “What Is Performance?” In The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 1. Routledge.Google Scholar
Birner, Jack. 1996. Mind, Market and Society: Network Structures in the Work of F.A. Hayek. Unpublished manuscript. dokumen.tips/documents/mind-market-and-society-network-structures-in-the-work-of-mind-market-and.html?page=1Google Scholar
Garson, James, and Buckner, Cameron. 2019. “Connectionism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/ Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, 4:519–31. doi.org/10.2307/3207893 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, Michel. 1998. The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Callon, Michel. 2007. “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, ed. Donald A. MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, 311–57. Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Marvin A. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connolly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cunha, Gabriel Oliva Costa. 2015. “The Road to Servomechanisms: The Influence of Cybernetics on Hayek from the Sensory Order to the Social Order.” The Center for the History of Political Economy Working Paper Series, 8 October. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2670064 Google Scholar
Damiano, Rossana, Lombardo, Vincenzo, Monticone, Giulia, and Pizzo, Antonio. 2019. “Artificial intelligence for dramatic performance.” In International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, ed. Mario Alviano, Gianluigi Greco, and Francesco Scarcello, 542–57. Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59:3–7. www.jstor.org/stable/778828 Google Scholar
Dettmers, Tim. 2015. “Deep Learning in a Nutshell: History and Training.” NVIDIA Developer Blog, 16 December. developer.nvidia.com/blog/deep-learning-nutshell-history-trainingGoogle Scholar
Dixon, Steve. (2007) 2015. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorsen, Annie. 2019. “Plato, Procedures, and Artificial Everything.” TDR 63, 4 (T244):113–20. doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00878 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2009. On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Eacho, Douglas. 2021. “Scripting Control: Computer Choreography and Neoliberal Performance.” Theatre Journal 73, 3:339–57. doi.org/10.1353/tj.2021.0071 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan, 195–230. Penguin.Google Scholar
Fuster, Joaquín M. 2011. “Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience.” In Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology 15:3–11. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galison, Peter. 1994. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21, 1:228–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. Protocol: How Control exists after Decentralization. The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halpern, Orit. 2015. Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Halpern, Orit. 2022. “The Future Will Not Be Calculated: Neural Nets, Neoliberalism, and Reactionary Politics.” Critical Inquiry 48, 2:334–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin.Google Scholar
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The American Economic Review 35, 4:519–30. www.jstor.org/stable/1809376 Google Scholar
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1952. The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1964. “Kinds of Order in Society.” New Individualist Review 3, 2:3–12.Google Scholar
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1964) 2018. “Theory of Complex Phenomena.” In Critical Approaches to Science and Philosophy, ed. Mario Bunge, 332–49. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hebb, Donald Olding. (1949) 2002. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Heims, Steve J. 1991. The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953: Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Higgins, Dick, and Higgins, Hannah. 2001. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34, 1:49–54. doi.org/10.1162/002409401300052514 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Matthew, and Wiggins, Chris. 2023. How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Kostelanetz, Richard. 1968. The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Mixed-means Performances. Dial Press Incorporated.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1996. “The Trouble with the Actor-Network Theory.” Philosophia 25, 3–4:47–64.Google Scholar
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 2015. The Power at the End of the Economy. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McCulloch, Warren S., and Pitts, Walter. 1943. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5:115–33. doi.org/10.1007/BF02478259 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirowski, Philip. 2012. “Minding the Cybernetic Gap.” Technology and Culture 53, 1:192–95. www.jstor.org/stable/41475465 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso Books.Google Scholar
Mirowski, Philip, and Nik-Khah, Edward M.. 2017. The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Elise, Nyong’o, Tavia, and Roach, Joseph. 2019. “Algorithms and Performance: An Introduction.” TDR 63, 4 (T244):8–13. muse.jhu.edu/article/740499CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munezero, Axelle. 2022. Personal interview with authors. Zoom, 11 November.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Lara D., and Ybarra, Patricia A., eds. 2012. Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations. Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Images, Operational. n.d. “About.” Accessed 9 November 2023. operationalimages.cz/Google Scholar
Otto, Ulf. 2019. “Theatres of Control: The Performance of Algorithms and the Question of Governance.”TDR 63, 4 (T244):121–38. doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00879 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. 2011. “Introduction: Why Cyborg Theatre.” In Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance, 1–13. Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2021. “How to Make a Class: Hayek’s Neoliberalism and the Origins of Connectionism.” Qui Parle 30, 1:159–84. doi.org/10.1215/10418385-8955836 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penn, Jonathan Nigel Ross. 2020. Inventing Intelligence: On the History of Complex Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the United States in the Mid-Twentieth Century. PhD diss., University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Andrew. 2007. “Ontological Theatre Gordon Pask, Cybernetics, and the Arts.” Cybernetics & Human Knowing 14, 4:43–57.Google Scholar
Pickering, Andrew. 2010. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Frank. 2022. “Music, Science and Healing Intersect in an A.I. Opera.” New York Times, 28 October. www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/artificial-intelligence-opera.html Google Scholar
Rosenblatt, Frank. 1958. “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain.” Psychological Review 65, 6:386–408. doi.org/10.1037/h0042519 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salter, Chris. 2010. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salter, Chris. 2020a. “Epistemes of Performativity.” Performance Research 25, 3:8–11. doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807744 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salter, Chris. 2020b. “Neuronal Acts.” Performance Research 25, 3:104–13. doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807768 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salter, Chris, Valérie Burri, Regula, and Dumit, Joseph. 2017. “Art, Design, and Performance.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouché, Clark A. Miller, and Laurel Smith-Doerr, 139–67. The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Slobodian, Quinn. 2018. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobodian, Quinn. 2023. Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Steyerl, Hito. 2023. “Mean Images.” New Left Review 140/141 (March–June). newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images Google Scholar
Teampa ˘u, Radu. 2022. “Emergence and Artificial Intelligence in the Performing Arts.” Colocvii teatrale 12, 1:105–13. doi.org/10.35218/tco.2022.12.1.09 Google Scholar
Varela, Francisco J. 1992. “Whence Perceptual Meaning? A Cartography of Current Ideas.” In Understanding Origins: Contemporary Views on the Origins of Life, Mind and Society, ed. Francisco J. Varela and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, 235–63. Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Velten, Hans Rudolf. 2012. “Performativity and Performance.” In Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, 249–66. De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiener, Norbert. (1948) 2019. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The MIT Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.Google Scholar

TDReadings

Dixon, Steve. 2017. “Cybernetic-Existentialism and Being-towards-death in Contemporary Art and Performance.” TDR 61, 3 (T235):36–55. doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00672 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Otto, Ulf. 2019. “Theatres of Control: The Performance of Algorithms and the Question of Governance.” TDR 63, 4 (T244):121–38. doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00879CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pizzo, Antonio, Lombardo, Vicenzo, and Damiano, Rossana. 2019. “Algorithms and Interoperability between Drama and Artificial Intelligence.” TDR 63, 4 (T244):14–32. doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00872CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wojnowski, Konrad. 2019. “Capturing the World with Performance: John Cage’s Probabilistic Aesthetics for the Digital Age.” TDR 63, 4 (T244):33–56. doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00873CrossRefGoogle Scholar