Performance-Making After AI: Susanne Kennedy’s and Markus Selg’s Posthumanist Theatre World – Lisa Moravec

Leuphana University Lüneburg I Central Building, C40.530

Tuesday. 21.10.2025, 2pm - 4pm

The increasing incorporation of automated AI technologies into society’s infrastructures has fundamentally reshaped both economic and social performance practices. This transformation began in the late-2000s, when machine learning gave rise to deep learning techniques and, subsequently, to generative AI systems. Considering the institution of theatre as a cultural micro-organism (one that operates according to a historically reproduced set of aesthetic, political, and economic practices), this talk explores how (self-)critical professional artists, working within and for the theatre have critically responded to what I term the AI-isation of societal operations. I examine this process as symptomatic of a techno-scientific and socially discriminating “cultural ideology of AI”, which values machines and their instrumentalising operations over human embodiment and living labour.

Looking through a Marxist feminist lens of cultural critique, I analyze the aesthetic strategies of the collaborative work of German theatre director Susanne Kennedy and visual artist Markus Selg—whose artistic practice has since 2016 demonstrated a critical and visionary engagement with our digitally AI-isised cultural condition. I conceive of their work as an “aesthetic critique” of our present human-machine constellation, I argue that their intermedia adaptation of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s postmodernist opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), reimagined through a technical montage of AI technologies, stages a dystopian “posthumanist theatre world” and an alienated “posthumanist form of acting”.

Lisa Moravec is a cultural critic and art historian specialising in transdisciplinary forms of contemporary performance at the intersections of the performing and visual arts since the 1960s. She is a senior postdoc at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she leads the FWF project “The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence, and Posthumanist Aesthetics” (2025-28). Her publications include Dressaged Animality: Human and Animal Actors in Contemporary Performance (Routledge, 2024); co-ed. ex. cat. Suddenly Begin in Splendour: Rose English (Aug 2024); co-ed. vol. Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices (Bloomsbury, spring 2026), peer-reviewed articles, essays in exhibition catalogues, and art criticism in international art magazines. 

Language: English.

Contact: vera.tollmann@leuphana.de

Hosted by the Center for Digital Cultures (CDC) in cooperation with the Center for Critical Studies (CCS).