The Great Outdoors Annie Dorsen
Anne Dorsen uses computers to generate works based on chosen texts. Her The
Great Outdoors feeds online comments through a computer algorithm, letting the data-monkey do the writing.
Plenty of philosophers, sociologists and artists, among others, are trying to get a handle on our technocentric times. The standard, usually critical conclusion most provide summons up the ghost of man becoming dominated by machines that he has himself created. Not so with Annie Dorsen whose close interest in these developments, rather than lead to rejection, brings out their performative dimension.
ALGORITHMIC THEATER An author and director whose work takes in theater, dance and video, Dorsen moved away from conventional staging at the end of the last decade and, in her collaborations with musicians, choreographers and programmers, tended increasingly towards hybrid forms, producing digital performances in which computer procedures take the lead. In 2010 she created her first algorithmic piece, Hello Hi There. Facing the audience, two computers dialogue by drawing on a recorded discussion from 1971 between philo- sopher Michel Foucault and linguist Noam Chomsky: the subject, the question of whether there is such a thing as innate human nature, with language as one of its hardwired capacities. The irony, of course, is that the text, generated live from out of 80,000 possible variations, is spoken by chatbots, whose software makes them capable of seeming to converse with a human being. Whether here, or later with Shakespeare’s Hamlet (in A Piece of Work (2013), Dorsen leaves it to algorithms to reconstitute the dialogues. In 2015, Yesterday Tomorrow applied the same principle with scores sung by three performers. Here again, each performance is different. Spectators will no doubt recognize the beginning ( Yesterday, by the Beatles) and the end of the show ( Tomorrow, from the musical Annie). But between the two, familiar melody disintegrates, syllables start to overlap, and rhythms either accelerate or slow down, making us lose our bearings. What Dorsen is offering us here is a take on our contemporary environment, saturated with information and calls to communicate— a world that is at once virtual and real, animated by an author-less language most powerfully expressed by chatbots. Although increasingly constructed, this language is not conducive to dialogue, because no machine will ever be convinced or made to change its opinion by what we tell it.
THE GREAT OUTDOORS The Great Outdoors draws on another form of Internet language: commentaries. Over the few days before each performance, these are collected on Reddit, a social platform where users post links to existing content on themes such as current events, societal issues or droll images of animals. Chitchat, questions, confessions, anecdotes and statements that are more or less civil are chosen in keeping with criteria of semantics, syntax and poetic potential, then assembled into a monologue by an algorithm. The language therefore comes from humans, which it doesn’t in Hello Hi There and A Piece of Work, but their anonymous discourse is not expecting any answers. It is “decoro rprealized.” Have we too become machines? By appropriating algorithms, Dorsen is trying to understand how they function, but also, and most importantly, how we function when we use them. She points up the paradox: the Internet offers an infinite number of choices, infinite knowledge, but because of our limited capacity to absorb and act, we are constantly making use of search and selection tools. The reality is that our purportedly “infinite” choices are predetermined by algorithms based on our “preferences” and on our own data trail. While presenting the illusion of choice, they shape our vision of the world on the basis of criteria that are actually narrow. NATURE AND CULTURE The immensity of the Web can be frightening. Annie Dorsen contemplates it as if it were a landscape. Without judging, she casts her eye over its contours, elevations and abysses, its colors and vibrations. Viewed as a natural environment, this landscape can also touch on the sublime, on that transcendence which at once elevates and crushes. Comments by users can be compared to stars, existing both alone and in constellations. A technological environment could almost seem more natural to us than nature itself, because for many years now it has been our everyday environment and most of the time we know how to use it, whereas today the codes of nature can be a mystery to us. The staging of The Great Outdoors plays on this paradox: around a digital camp fire, visitors are invited to look at a starry night sky programmed by a computer and projected on an inflatable dome set up specially for the occasion. With composer Sébastien Roux and several technical designers, Dorsen conceived a thoroughgoing environment designed to provide the same sensation of relaxation and exaltation as a real night sky. Man is trying to master technology just as he has always tried to master nature. But both are unpredictable. This is something that could make us feel uneasy. The algorithm that creates the text for The Great Outdoors draws on the notion of entropy theorized by Claude Shannon, which measures the uncer- tainty with which a message is received in accordance with the amount of information it contains: the simpler and more tautological the message, the more likely it is to be fully understood, because of its low entropy quotient. Depending on the situation, therefore, we go from order towards chaos, from the familiar towards the strange, from the banal towards gobbledygook, from gentle feelings to more aggressive ones. All this can also induce a kind of optimism, based on the idea that uncertainty can also lead to unexpected discoveries. This state of mind also applies to the relation that Dorsen sets up between viewers and actors. In keeping with the conception of performance developed by John Cage, her show is not an object of knowledge to be communicated, but an invitation to see things differently. Both the actors and the spectators await what is going to happen with the same curiosity. Each must act and activate their imagination. All kinds of reactions are possible, from the simplest emotion to philosophical or political reflection, or mathematical analysis. In a word, this all leads us towards interpretation, which is no doubt the finest manifestation of human creativity.
Translation, C. Penwarden