Story.glitch(DE) & Ethics of Interactive Play: in contexts of climate crisis, AI & migration
A practice-led performance interdisciplinary academic workshop exploring the intersection between migration, artificial intelligence and climate crisis, inspired by German novels written during WWII on the themes of exile, transitory lives, and tyrannous and fatal bureaucracies, with special reference to Anna Segher’s novel, Transit(1943).
Taking the core themes of Segher’s laconic and powerful study of the tyranny and deadly absurdity of visa bureaucracy and its impact on the lives of those fleeing the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, we will explore how these stories resonate today, and on into the future, in an era where bureaucratic systems are driven by AI that is non-transparent even to its engineers, and in which climate uncertainty is being used to foster scarcity narratives, drive xenophobia, and justify border closures across the world.
This one-day conference weaves together different approaches to thinking about contexts of AI, migration, climate crisis – to lay the conceptual foundations for a new, interactive, site-responsive performance about love, loss and bureaucratic tyranny.
Research questions include:
What is the relationship between the chimera of agency in gamification and the feeling of being caught in a bureaucratic web of increasingly sticky opacity?
How do we thematise the ethics of spectatorship – and the ethics of interaction – with reference to past and present fascism in Germany and beyond?
How do we reflect back on the implications of individualist decisions (or conversely, the power of collective and collaborative practice)?
How can we use immersion in tyrannous systems to explore the potentiality of alternative practices of interdependence and mutual care?