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

Leuphana Universität Lüneburg I Zentralgebäude, C40.530

Di. 21.10.2025, 14.00 bis 16.00 Uhr

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. 

Sprache: Englisch.

Kontakt: vera.tollmann@leuphana.de

Eine Veranstaltung des Center for Digital Cultures (CDC) in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Center for Critical Studies (CCS).