Monday Night Seminar: Sarah Bay-Cheng

"Bad Actors: Acting, AI & the New Avant-Gardes", a talk by Sarah Bay-Cheng (Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies)

About this Event

Join us at the Centre for Culture and Technology's Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by Sarah Bay-Cheng (Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies):

“Bad Actors: Acting, AI & the New Avant-Gardes"
This talk argues that artificial intelligence has been theatrical from the beginning; not only in the ongoing practice of staged unveilings and metaphors, but also within the function of systems that enlist and reshape human representation and personification. “Bad actors” names a double bind: both poor acting and malicious agency. But can nefarious impulses of computers be reclaimed and perhaps redeemed through a reframing within a history of experimental performance? Tracing bad actors from law to platform governance, I aim to show how authenticity regimes can function as theatrical score-keeping that rewards normative presentations. Against claims of AI’s uniquely disembodied “liveness,” machine-learning performances might have something in common with the avant-garde theatre, even as emerging technologies, including so-called “synthetic” performers challenge the idea that live performance is uniquely human. If, AI’s political economy feeds on compulsory online performance, is there a counter-power within the theatre’s capacity for producing so-called “bad” acting?


About the speaker:

Sarah Bay-Cheng, PhD is Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies and Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. Researching intersections of performance and emerging technologies, current projects include Digital Historiography and Performance: Introductions & Provocations (University of Michigan Press) and “AI in Performance-making: New Frontiers in the Humanities” , co-edited with Liam Jarvis and Aneta Mancewicz, and studies in arts data. Past publications include 4 books, most recently (University of Michigan Press, 2015).

About the Centre for Culture and Technology:

The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.

The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.

Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
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Instagram @uoftculturetech

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