Audience As Virus, 2024, 2025
Interactive immersive installation-performance
Audience As Virus , 2025. Performance
https://lumenprize.org/2025-performance-music-award-finalists/evadavidova
Audience As Virus is an ongoing research and an interactive immersive installation-performance that involves the audience in the possibility to break AI predictions of human movement and offers the public a clear capacity to intervene.
Machine learning has a filtration process that calls whatever it can’t understand “junk.” In that erasure, there is potency in information that cannot be processed. Audience As Virus misuses ChatGPT and HMDM (Human Movement Diffusion Model) to counter the patterns of replication, mimicry, and averaging.
In a space where counter-predictions are encouraged and disruption is welcomed, this participatory performance uses anti-efficiency and glitch errors to provoke new unpredictable, perhaps absurd, (but imaginable) movement and expressive relationships.
Project Collaborators:
Creative Technologist/Co-Director: Danielle McPhatter with the EY’s Intelligent Realities Lab; Performer/Choreographer/Co-Director: Vinson Fraley; Sound: Dafna Naphtali, Vinson Fraley, Matthew D. Gantt + Chat GPT and text to voice software; Costume: Daveed Baptiste; Digital Avatars Costumes: MX Oops and Eva Davidova; Lighting Design: DeAndra Anthony; Research Assistant: Nkolika Okoye
Audience as Virus was developed within the CultureHub Residency Program, through a EY-NEW INC Artist Residency, and with support from Onassis ONX Studio and EY Intelligent Realities Lab.
In times when our emotions and behavior don’t belong us because they are a market value, in times when social energy is harvested as if it were some transgenic corn crop, when perception is kidnapped, the senses saturated, not even the tiniest space for “being” is left, in times when we are simultaneously blind exploiters and the compliant exploited, identity is chewed up and spitted back as a model that’s useful and is convenient, and the time itself is used (and not elapsed or lived), we have to be, paraphrasing LHL, the T-cells, the lymphocytes that identify deseases. Also, the mycelium that penetrates the concrete, the grass that rips a crack, a spell that reaches the subconscious and opens spaces. And, it is not about reproducing or creating shapes, but about capturing forces (Deleuze/ Fr. Bacon)
Eva Davidova
New York, 2017