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I'm a Robot and I need Therapy

Marina Orlova
Wed 13 Nov ’24 and Thu 14 Nov ’24
Real-time therapy session for a mentally unstable AI.
Wed 13 Nov ’24
and
Thu 14 Nov ’24

A critical and ironic view on modern society's approach to empathy, technology ethics and psychiatric system through means of theatre, dance and dark comedy. I’m a Robot and I need Therapy is a piece that brings together topics of Artificial Intelligence and mental health in the medium of performance. Crossing the ideas of neurodiversity and responsible AI, it is working with the absurd idea of a “mentally unstable AI” and its “therapeutic needs”. 

I’m a Robot and I need Therapy is an experimental performance that crosses ideas of neurodiversity and data feminism and offers a critical and ironic view on modern society’s approach to technology, ethics, empathy and the mental health care system.  It includes a live therapy session for a “mentally unstable AI” and perspectives of “human agents”: AI-therapist, tech start-up CEO, hacker, AI’s girlfriend. Within the tragicomic genre it questions agency, subjectivity and power relations and draws parallels with the field of psychiatry, based on autobiographical material and personal experiences of being a neurodivergent artist and a psychiatric survivor. AI is engineered for this project and trained with a unique dataset; it generates text in real time and therefore becomes an improvisation partner.

About the maker

Marina Orlova is an independent dance/theatre maker and dramaturg. After receiving education in sociology in Moscow (‘09), Marina has been studying dance (since ‘12). She graduated from SNDO at the Amsterdam Academy of Theatre and Dance (‘21). Her main topics are mental health, tech ethics and migration; her aesthetics - tragicomedy and absurdism. Marina’s current artistic practice also includes writing, teaching and facilitating a support group for “artists in distress”. Since 2020 Marina is applying Data feminist approach to create political chatbot-performers: non-European AI, neurodivergent AI. With her ongoing anti-disciplinary research Marina mediates engineering logic and theatre apparatus in order to explore the process of meaning-making at the collision of the two worlds.

  • Duration: 55 min. 

Credits

concept, text, performer Marina Orlova dramaturgy Biljana Radinoska dramaturgical advisor Amelie Haller scenography, video design Emilia Grzeczka co-directing, video design, light design Nazar Rakhmanov creative process facilitation, dramaturgical advisor, production/PR manager Burkhard Körner live sound design Arieh Chrem prompt engineering Gregory Dyachkov AI engineering Artem Konevskikh Gregory Dyachkov machine learning special thanks to Raoni Saleh, Yves Regenass, Gala Faraus, Liza Spivakovskaya, Willem Weemhoff, Erik Lint, Jos Daamen, Asya Deinekina this project is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts),  Stimuleringsfonds (Creative Industries NL) and IDlab