Audience As Virus, 2024-ongoing

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.

Lumen Prize 2025 Performance & Music Award Finalist

Davidova rejects clean and tokenized interactivity characteristic of so much media art (think of the genre of media mirrors so popular in public spaces). Instead, Audience as Virus is reminiscent of a carnival or a rave, where the habit of the sense of self is blurred and messy, where movement and perception are tinged with an erotic allure and danger: you are also seen and witnessed – you are in it. Such an atmosphere leaves behind the tired and fatalistic lament of art and technology discourse: that we are socially overcoded by technical systems. Instead, we are presented with a much more capacious framing: You are enfolded and enfolding, you are coded and encoding a convolution of forces across social, mental, and environmental registers. Virality vectors across these registers, its movement inculcating both a potential for moving against and being moved. Virality is not a metaphor.
…