Sarah Bay-Cheng - "Bad Actors: The Future Is Artificial"

 

 

 

How does artificial intelligence—often viewed as a domain of logic, data, and computation—intersect with theatre, an art form often thought of as rooted in embodiment, storytelling, and discourses of liveness? This talk seeks to frame the processes and ideologies that we call ‘AI’ as distinctly theatrical phenomena, shaped by cultural scripts, human performances, and dramatic structures. Rather than focusing on ethical debates about generative AI in the arts, this paper explores the durability of theatre and performance as a metaphor for AI and asks how the tools of the theatre and theatricality might be used to warp AI away from its historical and normative habits toward a new avant-garde of performance. Provocatively positing AI as the future of theatre, Bay-Cheng looks at how algorithms are already influencing theatrical consumption and why an embrace of the artificial might be the best future for theatre of the future.