photo © Ann Mbuti, 2025
I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on "Artificial Intelligence on Stage" (Themen-Talk "Künstliche Intelligenz auf der Bühne") with dancer and choreographer Nicole Seiler, dancer and performer Gabriel Obergfell and artist Amanda E Metzger organized by Johanne Grilj at the Theater Casino Zug today after Nicole's dance piece "Human" in the Loop.
In this show an AI choreographs the piece and tells the dancers how to move and perform, so every performance is different. The panel discussed how co-creation with AI in different disciplines, such as performing arts and visual or conceptual arts, is battling against the windmills of generic styles. In the performance piece, it was particularly interesting to understand that AI has no sense of body and space.
Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" - a text I also read with ETH students in our critical thinking seminar - was also a great inspiration for the piece. For Nicole, the performers are Haraway's cybrogs. Amanda E Metzger is also a cyborg. She has trained an "AI" on her diaries, which she has been writing since childhood. Now anyone can create new entries, which are even minted as NFTs. Amanda is also a skin or avatar, as the artist invited other people to become her and go to openings for her, dressing, talking and behaving like her.
Somehow, in both cases, working with different AI tools creates very special forms of cyborgs, where the blend of human and machine is fluid, and like an arabesque (as it is said in the piece), they pompt each other.