Humanity, replication, whose work is protected

 Notes on Still Exhausted

Introduction

11:  While these advancements have arrived with their share of hype and grift, there is no doubt computers will increase their capacity to generate convincing images and speech at a click. Always engines of simulation and doubling, our ever-theatrical computational systems have become expert mimics of human visual art and language. AI thus presents intriguing questions about our relationship to falsity, the semiotics of language, and the crumbling liberal fantasy of authentic subjectivity (Jucan 2023; Dixon-Román and Amaro 2021; Jarvis 2021). But the actors of SAG-AFTRA were not marching from existentialist commitment. They marched for their interests. They posed the duality of computers v. performance, like so many Hollywood stories of doppelgängers, as antagonistic. As SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher put it: “What is our business, our gestures, our likeness, our acting, our voices? That’s what we’re selling. That’s who we are” (in Robb 2023). 

 

12:  they see the work of "live artists" taking up matters, specifically, of labor:   "Media artists like Anna Ridler and Sam Meech have emphasized the embodied efforts of their practices as they create over-laborious high-tech processes, as in Ridler’s hand-created mass dataset of tulips training an automatic tulip-classifier (Myriad [Tulips], 2018), or in Meech’s hacked knitting machine slowly weaving “8 Hours Labour” for its audience (8 Hours Labour—Limited Term Appointment, 2023). Just as dance artist Michelle Ellsworth has set herself to follow absurdly “efficient” routines of “outsourced” choreography generation (Clytigation: State of Exception, 2015), Mariel Pettee has trained an AI pose-detection model on her own movements in a melancholy solipsism, exploring what the work of just one body can produce (mememormee, 2023)"

Meanwhile, the interrelated threads of posthumanism, new materialism, and speculative realism have proven popular in discussions of mechanical, robotic, and AI performances (Eckersall et al. 2017; [End Page 12]

13:   Rae 2018; Lucie 2019; Condee and Rountree 2021). Such scholarship argues that emerging technologies should prompt us to broaden our conception of agencies and actors beyond the animal, in hopes that a decentering of human self-conception might foster a more cooperative and ecological political perspective. As some have responded to these scholars, however, this approach risks reifying and even valorizing technical objects that are the products of commercial enterprises and help maintain unequal social relations (Cotter 2016).

Far from portraying a world in which humans are thrown out of activity by ever-more-active technology, these latter artists stage the tools of automation failing. In Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself (2016), a robot arm is tasked with repeatedly sweeping up its own leaking viscera, failing to prevent its inevitable shutdown. In Ian Cheng’s Emissaries (2015–17), algorithmic simulations fail to cohere into dramatic action. In Kyle McDonald’s Discrete Figures (2018–22), a live AI-generated dance fails to shed its glitchy confusion, interrupting McDonald’s cool aesthetics with the rough mediation of live computation. In Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard’s For Claude Shannon (2016), dancers likewise fail to keep up with an algorithmically generated score, forgetting it as they progress. This last slip from technical objects to humans, easily made within performances of similar dramaturgy (what Ulf Otto has termed the “phantasm of displacement” [2021]), indicates the identification at their common root. The machines that are supposed to work instead of us perform exhaustion. A hypothesis, then: we are the ones who are exhausted. Even, and especially, when using machines at work.

[after ref smart phones, machine learning, social robotics]: It is not as if this technology has stepped in to do our work for us, whether at the theatre or at the office. We are exhausted, still.

 The tedium of laboriously setting motion on individual robot joints appears as an artistic project precisely because of its strain, because of the sheer quantity of coding labor required, not because robots will soon do our work for us.  Even artists and scholars working with the purportedly effortless manifestations of AI have emphasized the vast array of social labor required to train large image and language models in the first place: see musicians Holly Herndon’s and Mathew Dryhurst’s HaveIBeenTrained (2023), which back-solved the image generation model Stable Diffusion so artists could learn whether their images had been lifted to train it. Where better for these impulses to turn than the very domain of showing human activity, collaboration, and exhaustion: performance?

Performance can never quite forget the toil of being a body carrying out an action. “Virtual” performances can never shed the rough efforts of creating their smooth landscapes, “algorithmic” performances can never lose the human hierarchies and judgments they reproduce, and “distanced” performances can even draw the absent bodies of deceased workers back into the present for attention from those using the commodities they were once compelled to make.