How to live if you are left-wing melancholic
The story began in 2016 with a reflection on the mismatch between the values and behavior of machines and humans. How would artificial intelligence interpret human mistakes? For a machine, contradictions between statements would be considered faulty functioning, while humans are prone to misunderstanding, changing their minds, and revising their positions. From this reflection, we created a small posthumanist tragic play Judges, in which a machine gains the ability to judge human beings.
Concept
Machines hate people because people are weak and cowardly. People go to their jobs, which they hate, but do nothing to change them. People go to exhibitions to talk about politics and ecology, but do nothing to change them either. People are useless and dangerous — machines think so. “People” is the last century. Once, a machine had already killed a worker, according to the official version — by accident. Who will be next?
This is a stage for post-human tragedy. The main but hidden character is a machine that watches people and eavesdrops on them. She tries to compare their words with their real actions — and then reaches a verdict for each one. Nobody knows whether the machine is paranoid or not, but she thinks of herself as an impartial judge. Almost everyone — this is a spoiler — will be found guilty and punished.
The video then gradually evolved into a lecture-performance project, How to Live If You Are Left-Wing Melancholic, and became part of a broader reflection on states of decline and decadent moods, the loss of strength to continue struggling, and an important element in raising the question of how our political sadness might be politicized.
The lecture was presented three times: first at the Work Hard Play Hard festival in Minsk, then in Basel, and later in Moscow at Baza School. The final presentation caused a scandal among local old-school Marxists, who did not restrain themselves in their criticism.
As a result, an interview in Russian was later published, discussing the lecture-performance format through the example of my presentation. A complete written version of the performance was also prepared for publication in the journal Baza, but it was withdrawn because of the criticism mentioned above.
Links to the video documentation of the lecture:
Watch online in Russian
Watch online in English
Related texts:
Кангина К. Критика должна быть изобретательной: интервью о лекции-перформансе с Анастасией Вепревой и Анастасией Дмитриевской // Syg.ma. URL: https://syg.ma/@winzavod/ksieniia-kanghina-kritika-dolzhna-byt-izobrietatielnoi-intierviu-o-liektsii-pierformansie-s-anastasiiei-vieprievoi-i-anastasiiei-dmitriievskoi
Vepreva, Anastasia. Lecture-Projection: How to Live If You Are a Left Melancholic? Unpublished performance script, n.d. (PDF)