Performing the Glitch

AI (artificial intelligence) commonly enters on stage and in film as an android, a machine that performs the human by enacting the not-quite-human. As this essay demonstrates, the android character emerges from a common scenario that conjures a phantasm of replacement, only to subsequently dispel it by the performance of a glitch: enacting a temporary malfunction of the machine by a lapse in naturalist acting conventions, the android aims to reenact the human distinction. Taking first a theoretically inspired approach to analyze the theatrical workings of the scenario, the second part retraces its genealogy from Enlightenment automata to robot melodrama. Contrasting the latter with the modernist embrace of the machine, it is argued that the animatronic anthropomorphism of android drama radically misconstrues the posthuman situation of technology and society today. Paradoxically, the robots enacting the human have more to do with eighteenth-century technologies of self than with twenty-first-century machine learning. Flagging theatre's "human bias" in dealing with matters of technology, these deliberations lead to a renewed plea for tricksters and cyborgs when dealing with AI

Aesthetics · Android (operating system · Art · Drama · Literature · Posthuman · Computer Science · Theatre and Performance Studies · Artificial Intelligence