For Artforum, Miriam Felton-Dansky Explores Algorithmic Spontaneity in Annie Dorsen’s Work

Unlike other performance art retrospectives, Algorithmic Theater: An Annie Dorsen Retrospective does not distill so much as it re-presents many of Annie Dorsen’s iconic performances. Writing for Artforum, Miriam Felton-Dansky, associate professor of theater and performance, considers Dorsen’s algorithmically infused works in our current context. “Dorsen began collaborating with computers well before algorithm was a commonplace term in digital and social media discourse,” she writes. Appropriately, many of the pieces in the retrospective use what would now be considered “outdated” software and code. The artist uses these artifacts, Felton-Dansky argues, “not for the sake of nostalgia or kitsch but because these particular systems—conserved over years by Dorsen—are the trained performers that ‘know’ how to execute the show.” In A Piece of Work, the text of Hamlet is given over to code, producing five abbreviated versions of the play. The performance of A Piece of Work briefly involves a human actor, who enters in act three, “vocalizing computer-generated text fed to him through an in-ear device” that varies from performance to performance. Like much of Dorsen’s work, Felton-Dansky writes, A Piece of Work “offers a means of contemplating the myriad ways humans can be absent or abstracted from one another, distilled into statistics or collapsed into scrolling social media posts.”

Post Date: 02-07-2023