The computer scientist and cultural scholar Dr. Diana Serbanescu (Foto: Nora Heinisch, Plasma Magazine)
Diana Serbanescu: I believe in the power of theatre and artistic practices to act as mediator between technological and scientific discoveries on one hand, and the general public on the other hand. Complex scientific concepts can be translated into imaginative and experiential formats to engage diverse citizen groups in a playful dialogue with the research community. In order to foster diversity and inclusivity, it is important to create experimental grounds for public engagement, to explore the collective imaginaries around AI, and to empower citizens to become active participants in co-designing emerging technologies.
Moreover, unencumbered by scientific constraints, artists invent novel ways — frequently pushing the envelope — to use technologies, and thus discover their possibilities and limitations. The artistic practice is highly valuable for critically reflecting on their implications within specific socio-cultural contexts, exposing vulnerabilities through unforeseen use cases. I consider artistic methods and practices to be of critical importance, and necessary to complement the scientific mind-sets.
Subscribing to the idea promoted by Augusto Boal that "theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it", I co-founded REPLICA as a practice-led research project, and a laboratory for collective experimentation. REPLICA consists of a core team of artists with hybrid fields of expertise ranging from design to theatre-making through academic research and creative writing – and a number of temporary, project-based collaborators. We experiment with various techniques and methodologies from theatre practice in order to moderate, critique and develop new interaction designs for emergent technologies. In one of our most recent experiments, we invited theatre practitioners from the Grotowski Institute in Poland to facilitate an intensive training for a timespan of two weeks with a mixed group of nine performers, actors, designers, artists with the purpose of studying how the Grotowski-based theatre techniques are moderating human-to-human interactions and which of these techniques could be applied to designing engaging interfaces for human-machine interactions.
Our goal is to create a theatre-mediated framework around the design of emergent technological systems, in which to foster embodied interactions with technological systems, create forums for discussions and critique, develop creative prototypes as alternatives, imagine and enact specific scenarios, speculate about future developments of our socio-technical societies, and illustrate these through stories. Our research is focused on embodied and situated knowledge and unfolds as a series of workshops, community events, prototyping sessions and performances.