Scholarship about autonomous vehicles rarely reveals itself as central to critiques of generative AI, but in this talk we propose an interrogation of autonomous driving as ripe for consideration in larger dialogues about the politics and performance of machine learning, as well as a productive site in which to deploy the tools and methods of performance studies. We consider the ways the situation of driverless cars in urban environments crystallize some of the large questions about socioeconomic injustice that are raised by machine learning as a whole--and in particular explore Autonomous, a performance piece on which we are collaborating that brings the work of twentieth century theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht to bear on algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence, asking audiences to ponder, in both playful and sincere registers, the logics and politics that undergird machine learning systems. In particular, we explore resonances between autonomous driving and Brecht’s street scene, which bring similar questions to the fore: cases in which the prospect of an accident prompts a reckoning with underlying circumstances, social forces that are already operative but not immediately visible until they quite literally collide.
Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her research, including her 2021 book, Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief (Northwestern University Press) takes up performances of authenticity, sincerity, falsity, and dissembling to examine how they continue to mean differently in developing media and performance contexts. She is the winner of the ATHE Outstanding Article prize for her 2019 “‘We are not making a movie’: Constituting Theatre in Live Broadcast,” and her writing has appeared in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Theatre Review, the International Journal of Performing Art and Digital Media, and the online journal Amodern. With Aaron C. Thomas, she is co-editing a forthcoming special section of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism titled “Consent and its Limits.”
Miriam Felton-Dansky is Associate Professor and Chair of Theater & Performance at Bard College. She is the author of Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age (Northwestern University Press, 2018). Her articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, TDR, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Theater Magazine, and PAJ, as well as Public Books, Artforum, ASAP/J, American Theater, and the Brooklyn Rail. She was a theater critic for the Village Voice from 2009-2018. She is currently writing an infrastructural history of experimental theater in New York between 2000 and 2019 and a book about interface theater with Jacob Gallagher-Ross.
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This event is co-sponsored with metaLAB (at) Harvard.
LOCATION:Online STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250508T180000Z DTEND:20250508T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR