DARK

It is often said of technology that it will replace us: the machine replaces the factory worker, subways become fully automated, train and bank counters are replaced by apps and vending machines, and so on. What about having your voice or image processed by AI, and then watching and listening to what your digital double has to say to you? Having yourself replaced, while still sitting there, is something else.

What we are talking about here, then, is not a robot, machine or algorithm replacing a human being. You are being replaced by ... a version of yourself. Is it laziness, fascination, narcissism?  Or does the desire to be replaced by a double reflect a desire to be like the gods, the deep urge to create our own human beings? This time it is neither a homunculus as in alchemy nor an android, but rather an entity composed of language and image. The risk, however, is that we become not a god but an extra in our own existence.

Now there are apps that let you “double” yourself so that when you die, friends, loved ones or family can continue to interact with your AI avatar. There are also apps in which you can design an AI partner to talk to you daily, send messages, and generate photos of fun “outings,” possibly with AI children. These are more extreme forms of everyday conversations with ChatGPT and the like. What these AIs all share is that they mostly confirm opinions and are often used to fill the void of lonely users. The other, another point of view, thus disappears even more from everyday experience.

With DARK, Kris Verdonck explores this new, combined experience of absence and presence. AI applications such as chatbots and digital partners are the new technological ghosts. Except they have the special feature that we no longer always experience them as ghosts. They are not “present absences” like the traditional ghosts of the dead. After all, when a voice or image is experienced as “real” by the viewer, it in a way becomes reality. From then on, to some extent, it does not matter whether that voice or image actually “exists”. Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori conceived the Uncanny Valley to relate empathy for objects to humans: the more they resemble humans, the more empathy we experience for them. There is a critical point, however, where we “fall” into the Uncanny Valley: the familiar, dead thing becomes too real or “alive” and because of this it literally becomes unheimlich (homeless).It can no longer be classified into existing categories and finds itself in the gray zone of the Uncanny Valley. AI bots and AI partners go one step further. They are no longer “in,” but on the other side of the uncanny valley, the uncanny is pushed into the background by increased empathy.

Deepfakes and AI chatbots tell something about the condition of technology, but at least as much about their users' sense of reality. About how susceptible we are to deception; about how fragile our sense of reality is. About how language and images affect our perception, experience and feelings. With the advent of AI, everything is potentially real and unreal. Everything can be ghost-like, everything can be theater.

In each of the three performances in DARK, this tension between presence and absence, real and fake, human and technology is at play. The “original” artist, dancer, performer, musician is doubled by a type of avatar. For the spectator, however, it remains a live experience. With DARK, Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company continues to build on a body of work that focuses on absence and the relationship between humans and technology. This circuit performance is a next step after previous similar formats such as ACTOR #1 (about objects as performers) and IN VOID (about machines that continue to perform, after human existence).

What body lives in the Internet's black box? DARK refers to the dark space in which our virtual body resides. This body is continuously falling apart, cannot be held together, may even not be there at all. The audience sits in darkness, in a circle around the scene. Light, sound, movement and body are connected by interactive media. In the darkness a figure looms, she appears and disappears. Like a puppet, she hangs in the void, distorted, at the mercy of a machine that seems to control her - although it is not clear who or what that machine is. The performer's physicality is uncertain, palpable, but unverifiable.

Every day we spend hours behind screens, scrolling through social media and news websites or swiping on dating apps and TikTok. The impact of this connection to apps and the devices we use them on can hardly be overstated. Hours of distraction, disinformation, advertisement and meaningless content influence our self- and worldview. Moreover, because of algorithms that amplify our identified preferences, we are caught in a “loop”: ideas are confirmed, or we are targeted because of gender, political affiliation, age, interests, ... to the extent that it is difficult for us to know exactly what we are watching - are we even watching at all? It's strange: we spend so much time and attention on apps and content of which we don't know where it comes from, what the intentions behind it are, or how it really affects us. Behind the slick black screen of the smartphone, is a black box, driven by algorithms aimed at profit and influence. In front of the screen: the user's body, whose virtual counterpart also lives its own life.

In the theater space, DARK explores that other black box: the space behind the computer or smartphone screen and the algorithms and artificial intelligence behind all kinds of social media and chatbots. 'Over there somewhere,' in that black box, a virtual body lives on Instagram, tinder or TikTok, while 'here,' a figure stands still, sitting in a room, body curved around a screen. The real “me” lives online. What body lives in that black box of the Internet? What does a body look like in this environment? Fragmented, completely manipulated by algorithms, bots, stimuli. A kind of unnatural body reminiscent of Hans Bellmer's dolls. Hermetically sealed off from the material world, locked in the virtual one. What remains: an online body distorted in a panicked cry for affirmation in a disorienting virtual-real world.

ACT #2 is a performative installation in which a voice speaks in a dark space. The thirteenth and final part of Samuel Beckett's Texts For Nothing (1952), spoken by the voice of Johan Leysen, echoes in a room with piles of gray blankets. ACT#2 was made as an ode to Leysen, who died in 2023. He performed the central monologue of ACT, a triptych around the work of Samuel Beckett and his Texts for nothing, created in 2020. Verdonck continued to work with the scenography from the performance. The audience now enters the space that was previously the scene for the actor. The stage becomes a tomb, or the skull of the actor whose distinctive voice keeps going in the twilight.

For ACT #2, Leysen's voice will be processed by an AI application to make it “come alive” again. Beckett was always interested by the latest media and technologies. He decoupled voice and body and often placed his characters in the twilight zone between existence and disappearance.AI offers a different perspective on this. Sometimes it seems as if the voice in Beckett is the last human presence on the planet, of enormous loneliness. It speaks of and from a character in search of peace, either in silence or in an ordinary story and ordinary life. But the thoughts and the voice in the head do not stop. After the silence, the thoughts return and even in silence words appear on paper.

The absence of the actor and the continued muttering of the voice, takes on new meaning thanks to the use of AI technology. The voice even remains after death, there is no guarantee of rest.

The death of the actor, and his replacement with a copy of his voice, almost becomes an omen for the end of theater.  What remains is a theatrical installation with a voice and objects that go on and on. Cloths go up and down, in an endless cycle. From the darkness, the words continue to echo, the thoughts milling, in a final long-stretched scream that wants to obliterate everything, and at the same time announces that it will continue to exist doggedly.

BRASS #2 is a ghost orchestra. Three sousaphones play by themselves and appear to float in space. These automated instruments are part of Verdonck's research into a theater after humans. Maxime Denuc composes electronic music and in recent years has worked with computer-controlled organs as powerful synthesizers. For BRASS #2, he created a sound piece inspired by principles from circular music. The sousaphones were developed by Decap, specialists in making automated musical instruments. Their rotating movements create a slow motion doppler effect, where sounds sometimes converge and then move away from each other.

Human emotion and the capacity for abstraction are perhaps most strongly expressed in music and playing an instrument. Music is also something of the gods, from the celestial tones on Mount Olympus to the harmony of the spheres echoing in the universe. In BRASS#2, this pinnacle of humanity is taken up by machines and algorithms. Yet the sound still has human traits: breathing, blowing, is “rehearsing” and warming up. In a perpetual motion the instruments hang in a dark space - their material shines, but the body on which they normally rest, the lungs that breathe air into the instrument, are no longer there.