Left and Right, or Being who/where you are

Showcase

Mar 13, 2021 @ Re-fest 2021, CutultureHub NYC
Feb 10-14, 2021 @ Brown Arts Initiative, Brown University

"Left and Right, or Being who/where you are" is an interactive online AI theater performance created in collaboration with Brown Arts Initiative, based on researches by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alex Juhasz, and the Beyond Verification Team associated with the Digital Democracies Institute.

Description

In this time of intense divisions, a left partisan and a right partisan speaking with each other seems like an impossible conversation - or, at least, a conversation that is impossible to have meaningfully on certain so-called “hot-button” topics and complex realities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or immigration.

This devised, interactive online multimedia performance stages scenes that feature such conversations … performed by both human actors and bots. The human and machinic actors play different characters that embody, complicate, and deconstruct different types of performative, prescribed political identities on the left-right spectrum (approached with a US-focus but through a transnational lens). These political identities are shown to be not static or unalterable, rather, the result of relational, performative processes that occur over time and with technology. Theatrically playing with(in) these processes, Left and Right aims to call forth more capacious ways of being - and being political. For more details, please visit: left-and-right.art.