Annie Dorsen, a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant
winner, is a theater creator and director. She produces works that showcase the
complex interactions that take place between machines and humans by creating algorithmic
theater, in which texts are algorithmically determined and generated in real
time for each performance of a piece. By doing so, she is “pioneering a new genre
of theatre that dramatizes the ways in which nonhuman intelligence is
profoundly changing the nature of work, culture, and social relationships.” Dorsen
has worked in algorithmic theater since 2010, and her most notable pieces
include A Piece of Work (2013) and Yesterday Tomorrow (2015). A
Piece of Work involves algorithmic-generated scripts paired together with
human performers. The text of Hamlet is run through a set of algorithms,
and “Hamlet’s struggles to understand the human psyche find expression in the
performer’s task of embodying the character as he recites a soliloquy on the
spot by the computer.” Yesterday Tomorrow is staged similarly to A Piece
of Work, but there are three performers sight-singing music produced by a
computer program as the score gradually transforms from the Beatles’ “Yesterday”
into “Tomorrow” from Annie. It is the singers’ duty to keep up with the “minute
and continuous” changes in the music, and “their obvious effort and
concentration make visible the heedless and tightly scripted pathways of
machine intelligence.”
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| Yesterday Tomorrow set |
In an artist’s statement, Dorsen says, “I
try to make perceptible how ideas change over time: where they come from, how
they influence, and are influenced by politics and culture, and how they take
root in the body, physically and emotionally…. With these pieces I’m thinking
about how we live increasingly wrapped up and entangled with objects that don’t
act like objects. The new technologies we have created don’t stay in their place,
but rather speak back to us, demanding our attention, drawing us into their
logic. My projects are about experiencing not only how these tools work, but
how we work with them.” Essentially, just like many other creatives, Dorsen is
partially driven by her own curiosity of the world. Dorsen additionally thinks
of herself as a “theater maker” and does not question what discipline a
particular work falls into, which demonstrates her open-mindedness as a creator.
When asked about how she came up with “algorithmic
theater,” Dorsen replied, “I was learning about evolutionary computation, and I
had a thought: You could use an algorithmic tool to slowly and unpredictably
turn one thing into another.” Her answer shows that Dorsen uses divergent
thinking in her creative process, and it has enabled her to come up with new
and refreshing ideas for what theatre can be. Her process also flows from work
to work. In one of her first pieces, Hello Hi There, there was a section
in the database that had some lines of Shakespeare, and whenever the
performance included those lines, it made Dorsen happy to hear the chat bots
speak in lines of scrambled Shakespeare; this is an example of intrinsic
motivation amid the extrinsic motivation Dorsen has for wanting to expand theatre.
Dorsen says, “I just wanted to make something I liked. And that might be
interesting – and that, in the process, I would learn something from.”
Lastly, Dorsen learns from her failure,
as discussed in Lehrer’s article, “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing
Up.” She says she is always tweaking the
algorithm as she believes there is always space for unexpected outcomes and
outputs. Her tweaking also includes adding logic to whatever the algorithm puts
out, and dramaturgical decisions inspire that logic. About her work, she says, “All of our storytelling, and all of our imagination, and
our daydreams and fears and anxieties and regrets are being experienced in a
present moment. And performance, of course, is an art form based in time. It’s
the fundamental material. And, when it’s at its best, it creates a very
heightened awareness of the present.”
This is absolutely fascinating! I really admire how she is adapting so much of this ever-increasingly intelligent technology into a medium of art that typically seems so distinctively human. She is revolutionizing theatre through challenging all of these typical notions about what it 'should' be, and I think that's so incredible. Thanks for sharing!!
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