When AI goes to theater with humans, it changes the dynamics of the social space. This article examines a case of audiences using an AI app on their phones to translate a sign language performance. Whom does the screen interface serve, and how do artificial intelligence tools affect theatrical publics across both the playing space and the playgoing space? Screens are a site where cultural and performative meanings are generated and negotiated.
Screens in All the World’s A Screen, an Irish Sign Language production in 2022-2023, served and became co-spectating theatrical publics. The organizers encouraged the theatergoing public to use an AI app on their phones, their anthropomorphized “machine guests,” to obtain auto-captioning based on pose analysis of the actor and to receive retail suggestions that the AI deemed relevant. Operating both within and beyond the fabula of the performance, screens as anthropomorphic interfaces create multiple theatrical publics through an imperfect spectatorial proxy.
To understand AI’s impact on theatre, I use interface theory to analyze the roles of screens in regulating publics’ access to performance, producing new ambient conditions of theatergoing and changing the publics’ relationships to themselves and to performance. Operating both within and beyond the fabula of the performance, screens as anthropomorphic interfaces create multiple theatrical publics through an imperfect spectatorial proxy.
The production All the World’s A Screen experimented with machine translation in order to explore the boundary between the human and the nonhuman as well as the dynamics of human-machine relationships. The organizers encouraged the audience to use an artificial intelligence (AI) app on their smartphone during all iterations of the performance.1 Equipped with Google Lens, the app provided real-time auto-captioning based on pose analyses of the actors. During the final scene, the organizers asked the audiences to set the app to retail mode, revealing to those using the app several links to clothing items it had recognized onstage. Co-opted into commerce, the app linked the public of the theater with larger consumer publics.
The auto-captioning of sign language was flawed and incomplete, because the AI was only able to translate syntactical contents. Akin to a series of doorways enabled by content generators (actors and apps) and containers (interfaces), screens constructed contrasting patterns of dramatic vision of: (1) Irish Sign Language and its auto-caption based on pose analysis; (2) verbal simultaneous interpretation and its modern English transcription; and (3) Shakespeare’s text.
As a form of intersectional, public Shakespeare, All The World’s A Screen highlighted the value of Deaf theater. It centered Deaf culture in Shakespearean interpretation. It also flipped the theme of accessibility, which is typically framed as a minority issue in performances of spoken-language theate, by granting hearing communities and individuals raised in an oralist tradition textual access to a Deaf performance.
Excerpted from Alexa Alice Joubin, “Screens as Anthropomorphic Interfaces: How AI Changes Shakespearean Theatrical Publics,” Shakespeare Bulletin 41.4 (Winter 2023): 529-553 (full text PDF)