Performativity without theatricality: experiments at the limit of staging AI

ABSTRACT Referencing participant observation in a research-creation lab devoted to performance and artificial intelligence (AI), this article summarizes and intervenes within two discourses surrounding the performativity of computation. I first summarize the media-theoretical debate over whether or not electronic computation counts as what J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida defined as ‘performative’. This turns out to be a divide over the politics of theoretical analysis, and as such these positions can be synthesized together. Relying on Samuel Weber’s concept of ‘theatricality’, I set out a novel proposal for understanding computation as representing a limit of performativity without theatricality. Secondly, I review the experiments conducted with staging recent machine-learning models within the University of Toronto’s BMO Lab. A scholarly tradition distinct from the above has turned to a ‘metaphysical performativity’, describing all reality as performatively animate rather than representational and inert; some have pointed to recent AI developments as a demonstration of the truth of this view. I dissent, with evidence from the aesthetic experience of watching AI performance. Finally, I critique the ideology implicit in theories that take the appearance of AI animacy as a model for social reality.