CII Lecture Series: Gillian Wearing, Wearing Gillian, and the Generative Theatricality of Deepfakery
Nov 20 | 3:30-5:00 PM | Student Union 330
Gillian Wearing Between mask and mirror, 2017
This talk begins with the premise that applications of generative AI can be apprehended as fundamentally theatrical, and that doing so illuminates how the study of theatre, a form and practice steeped in artifice, can help us grapple with generative AI’s putative artificiality and our anxieties over it, particularly when they surface as suspicions about its penchant for dissembling—even as other substantive harms often seem to draw less urgent focus.
The key site is the work of conceptual artist Gillian Wearing, whose work has long explored preoccupations with identity, masquerade, and the power that deceptive appearances hold to interrogate notions of coherent selfhood and fixed identity. It examines Wearing’s work in order to make a case for the theatricality of deepfakes in particular and generative AI more broadly, as GenAI tools specialize in making things appear other than they are through investments in artifice, verisimilitude, and dissembling. Using Wearing’s work as an illuminating site, I argue that when GenAI creates persuasive synthetic representations, or presents the illusion of human likeness or labor, or effaces its own technical workings in favor of a perceived illusion of effortlessness, it acts theatrically. Moreover, I propose that the products and processes of GenAI frequently share with theatrical enterprises not only a concern with constructed likeness, but a similarly derogated place in popular and critical discourse, a persistent suspicion of the ways in which artificial intelligence appears to aid in dissembling and counterfeiting. This suspicion is legible as an inheritance from a durable and adaptable anti-theatrical prejudice—what Jonas Barish called an underlying “ontological queasiness,” an anxiety over theatricality that continues to find “subtler and more sophisticated channels of outlet” in the larger world as “the old hatred” of theatre qua theatre “has ebbed.” By making a case for GenAI and its products as fundamentally theatrical, my paper also problematizes the resilient anti-theatrical prejudices that attend its association with fakeness and dissembling.
About the Speaker
Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her research takes up performances of authenticity, sincerity, falsity, and dissembling to examine how they continue to mean differently in developing media and performance contexts. Her book, Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief, was published in 2021 by Northwestern University Press, and her writing has also appeared in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Amodern, and the International Journal of Performing Art and Digital Media.
