TaPRA 2025 Performance and New Technologies - Postdigital and AI Dramaturgies: Gen Alpha and the Politics of Care in Online Performance

Date: 27.08.2025 - 29.08.2025
Conference / symposium
Format: onsite
Location: Coventry, United Kingdom
Event Fee: Free

Organizer(s):
Theatre & Performance Research Association

The Performance and New Technologies Working Group is inviting proposals concerning emergent performative paradigms of generative artificial intelligence (AI) that intersect with the politics of care. We are particularly interested in proposals that engage with the online performance cultures of Generation Alpha (children born after 2010) and performances created for the internet during the COVID-19 lockdowns. We invite you to ponder/reflect on how mediated and online performances can be read as ecologies of becoming (Mastrominico 2022) which, using generative AI tools, actuate posthuman dramaturgies that are concerned with politics of care in relation to the social world of generation Alpha. The theme of ‘care’ draws on research regarding the novel performative experiences of connectivity and social interactions in online spaces audiences and artists constructed during the pandemic (Svich 2021) and, conversely, the political and social freedoms embodied, corporeal, ‘live’ theatre makes available to artists and audiences that are restricted in online spaces (Jarvis and Savage 2024, 4). These critical contexts have led the conveners to put concepts and practices of care in dialogue with performance processes which either expand, challenge, disrupt, or resist imaginaries of posthuman futurity. Inspired by the concept of ‘experiential AI’, we wonder what kind of posthuman dramaturgies can be observed when ‘machines work with humans in order to assist machine intelligence and to use machine intelligence to extend human intelligence’ (The Institute of Experiential AI 2025). Considering these issues in relation to Gen Alpha acknowledges the seismic cultural impact AI will have on a generation whose childhoods were marked by the trauma of lockdown and who do not remember a time before social media (let alone a world without the internet). Our questions for 2025 TaPRA conference are: How can we identify posthuman creative practice in current intermedial performances supported by AI? How do we address the ethical implications of developing and employing AI technologies in the context of AI-driven experience of Generation Alpha?

http://tapra.org/call-participation/tapra-2025-performance-and-new-technologies-cfp/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein