Hello Hi There

Hi Hello There by Annie Dorsen is based on a famous TV debate between the philosopher Michel Foucault and the language researcher and activist Noam Chomsky from 1971. The debate is used as inspiration and material for a dialogue between two chat programs. The two data programs are developed particularly to ape human conversations and every evening they perform a new dialogue broadcasted live.

In the tradition after the Middle Age mystics such as Ramon Lull and Albertus Magnus, who strived to build mechanic men in feather and bronze, to solve difficult, philosophical problems, chat programs are a modern response to the question about artificial consciousness. Which world of thoughts will be revealed when two computers sit down to reflect over what they have in common with people?

Hello Hi There is an intimate collaboration project between human and computer, a dialogue about humanity in the age of digital reproduction.

Director and writer Annie Dorsen works with theatre, film, dance and now also digital performance. In 2008 she directed the musical Passing Strange on Broadway, an assignment she received a series of awards for, including an Obie Award. Passing Strange was about an American who travels the world, a story inspired by the fact that the rich man’s son Bush Jr. had never been outside of USA prior to becoming president. This production was later adapted into a movie, directed by no less than Spike Lee. The movie was shown at several major film festivals before its official opening in 2010. Another collaboration project was the musical theatre performance Ask Your Mama, based on Langston Hughes poem from 1962, with music composed by Laura Karpman and performed by opera singers and the hip hop group The Roots in Carnegie Hall. The pop political performance Democracy in America was based on selling all the props. In addition to several other projects Annie Dorsen has won a number of prizes and has taught at several prestigious universities in USA.

Annie Dorsen writes the following about the Chomsky-Foucault debate:
"In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to participate in a televised debate. The topic was an age-old question: is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?

What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault),soon evolved into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviourism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.

Chomsky was already world-famous as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and, as a linguist, for his theory of universal grammar, which claims a universal and biological basis to linguistic structures. He argues that the capacity for language, unique to humans, requires enormous inborn creativity. There is a gap between the experience of language that young children receive from their environment and the fluency they develop; Chomsky explains this gap by arguing that there exist in the brain certain biological structures which make facility with language possible. He extrapolates from this that there must exist other structures in the brain that provide a biological, and therefore universal, basis for other human qualities, "other domains of human intelligence…other domains of human cognition, and even behaviour."

At the time of the debate, Foucault had already published many of his most influential works, including Folies et déraison (Madness and Civilisation) and Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), in which he controversially stated that "man is an invention of recent date, and one perhaps nearing its end." Foucault begins the debate by admitting that he is suspicious of the entire notion of human nature, for the reason that such a concept, far from serving to explain observable phenomena, tends rather to operate like a policeman, judging which ideas and behaviours qualify as acceptably "human" and which "inhuman". He finds Chomsky’s position both morally and politically dangerous because biology and linguistics are historical constructions tied to power. He advocates for a radical excavation of the genealogy of such concepts, to try first to discover the origin of and basis for them in external factors, "outside the human mind, in social forms, in the relations of production, in the class
struggles, etc."

Neither was satisfied with his own (or the other’s) performance, and it is generally regarded as a problematic and rather lacklustre meeting. Nonetheless the debate offers a unique look at an exceptional meeting between two key thinkers of the 20th century – as well as, unintentionally, an example of the failure of dialogue to produce new understanding and new thought."

Annie Dorsen writes the following about chatterbots:

"Chatterbots (also called "chatbots") are computer programs designed to engage in conversation. Ordinarily, they are programmed to talk to a human user, with the intention of fooling the human into thinking that he or she is talking with another human, rather than a machine. One of the simplest and most elegant forms of artificial intelligence, chatterbots became a popular area for development in the late 60s and early 70s."

She quotes Philip Auslander’s Live from Cyberspace: "The chatterbot may well be the locus at which a new crisis around the issue of liveness will crystallise, this time in relation to digital technologies. It is important in this context to stress that chatterbots are not playback devices. Whereas audio and video players allow us to access performances carried out by other entities (i.e., the human beings on the recordings) at an earlier time, chatterbots are themselves performing entities that construct their performances at the same time as we witness them.

Bots are technological entities, but they constitute a technology of production, not reproduction. Although chatterbots are programmed and draw their conversational material from databases, their individual performances are responsive to the actions of other performers -- autonomous, unpredictable, and improvisational. That is, they perform in the moment. But what the chatterbot does…is considerably more profound: it undermines the idea that live performance is a specifically human activity; it subverts the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to the experience of live performance; and it casts into doubt the existential significance attributed to live performance."

Sources: Black Box Teater, autumn program 2010. 06.09.2010: http://www.blackbox.no/content/titlePresentation.php?tid=2058

BIT Teatergarasjen, autumn program 2010. 06.09.2010: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/349

Performance program from BIT Teatergarasjen.