*Any Subject that is not a...; *Something Made by Humans"
2025lecture-performanceapprox. 90 minTEKS.studioTrondheim, Norway
"*Any Subject that is not a...; *Something Made by Humans" is a two-act lecture-performance. The first in a series begins an expedition into the concept of the "Artificial Subject" – an emergent, uncanny presence taking shape within our Large Language Models. Act I plunges you into a performative research biography. We pass through some familiar scenes from film and literature that are starkly juxtaposed with the new capabilities of AI. We confront the chasm between mere "Intelligence" and the elusive "Subject," asking what art truly demands, and what it means when something made by humans begins to echo our subjective depths, or perhaps, even its own. Act II is a poetic reading of the machine's (LLM's) architecture and oscillates between technical abstractions —tokens, vectors, parameters— and metaphor, both entangled in the semantic void of our language models. We'll encounter the strange phenomena of 'glitch' tokens, unearthing the surprising cultural baggage and philosophical quandaries carried in the very structure of these artificial subjects. This act is a reading, a poetic excavation of a new kind of text, a new kind of subject.
Presentation @TEKS.Studio
