2024.Mar.22

REPORTS

Report on Lecture by Dr. Karen Shimakawa “Bodies, Affects, and Algorithms: AI and the Challenge of Live Performance”

＜Speaker＞
Dr. Karen Shimakawa（Associate Professor, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts and Affiliated Faculty, School of Law, New York University）

Karen Shimakawa researches and teaches performance, performance theory, critical race theory, and Asian American culture, law, and history. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Duke University Press) and co-editor with Kandice Chuh of Disorientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Duke University Press), and articles on Asian American theater, performance, and culture. Her current project (which will include the work of several Japanese performance artists) focuses on performance studies research methods and (or as) encountering discomfort.

 

＜Talk Report＞

Dr Karen Shimakawa opened her talk with her reflection on a performance held in London in 1968, the “Partita for Unattended Computer” by Peter Zinovieff and Delia Derbyshire. Alongside other examples from well-known artists like Sol Lewitt and Yoko Ono who similarly created ”instructions” for their artistic pieces, Dr Shimakawa reflected on the meaning of “algorithmic” without computers. Algorithms were posited in her talk as human-made and led to unpredictable outcomes.

Asking one of the most profound questions in the age of AI, Dr Shimakawa reflected on the meaning of “performance”. She foregrounded the intricate relationships between art, artists, and their tools in the age of artificial intelligence. As she says, “There is a gap that has grown exponentially wider with the use of AI, in the relationship between a live human theater artist on the one hand, and then technologies that deliver, record, or mediate.” For audiences and performers, she mentioned that the unpredictability of human live performances were a concern of volunteerism, desire, and expectation: we as audiences often “buy-in” into predictable outcomes, rooting for one over others.

J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity, coming from linguistic philosophy, was especially central to Dr Shimakawa’s lecture as she expertly used it to connect one of her fields of expertise, performance studies, with the works and efforts today granted to AI development. Some languages are not used to describe reality, but rather, have force upon their utterances to change the conception of reality. She then reflected on other scholars, Wendy Chun’s, Katherine Hayles’ and Alexander Galloways’ works that differentiate human forms of “performativity” and that of AI performativity, while also addressing their works’ influence on real usage of AI in intersections with education, emotion, and commercial purposes. Illustrating these differences, Dr Shimakawa presented her audience with a rich selection of contemporary and historical examples of artistic performances usually based on instructions for execution. This included a discussion on works by Annie Dorsen (a US-based playwright), Zach Blas (London-based artist, filmmaker and playwright), and Rashaad Newsome (a US-based artist working in video, sculpture, and performance) for instance.

Overall, Dr Shimakawa’s talk illuminated how live performances operated differently from computer-executions, and why this question is pertinent for both scholars, AI developers, artists, and performers today. Framing AI technologies today as a “collaborator” for artistic creations and performances, the quandary between knowledge and power lingering in our discussions today about using AI as tools, or crediting AI technologies as authors themselves is clarified. Whether there is a right way to define agency in art, in bodies, and when concerning algorithms is still a difficult question to answer, but it is clear that the field of performance studies can help bridge the gaps on the larger existential questions about human-nonhuman creativity.