Artificial theatres of the absurd

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the co-creative gesture of performing theatre with artificial intelligence invokes a quality of the ethical theatre of the absurd by positioning the human creative act in seemingly ‘equal’ relation to an uncaring passive intelligence. Drawing from the experiences of several theatre companies, including Improbotics (an improvisational theatre company that has been developing improvised dramatic works alongside artificial intelligence since 2016), this chapter looks at different applications of co-creativity with AI and how the theatre of the absurd is invoked. It examines the shift from the aesthetic to the ethical absurd, following the development of a theatre script co-writing system, ‘Dramatron’. It investigates how the human body works in service of artificially produced dialogue in the form of a cyborg presenting the meaningless words of a robot inside the meaning making machine of the human. And it explores AI translation tools to extend the framework of absurdity within language. Together, these case studies present a series of human/machine encounters that de-centre the human from the act of creation, pointing to a new kind of literary absurdism that is written in the human-machine encounter.