critical AI studies

When AI goes to theater with humans, it changes the dynamics of the social space. This article examines a case of audiences being asked by organizers to use an AI app on their phones to translate a sign language performance. This study draws on interface theories to analyze the roles of screens in regulating publics’ access to performance, producing new ambient conditions of theatergoing and changing the publics’ relationships to themselves and to performance. AI s creens in All the World’s a Screen, an Irish Sign Language production, served and became co-spectating theatrical publics. Operating both within and beyond the fabula of the performance, screens as anthropomorphic interfaces create multiple theatrical publics through an imperfect spectatorial proxy.