Reprogramming Reality: AI, Sensory Experience and Post-human Subjectivity in Simon McBurney’s The Encounter
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25130/jfa.conf.10.1.23Keywords:
Simon McBurney, The Encounter, post/humanism, AI and the theatre, immersive sound, the sensual, subjectivityAbstract
This article analyses how Simon McBurney’s The Encounter rethinks the experience of theatre by deploying artificial intelligence, binaural sound technology and 3D audible narrative to produce a post-human form of subjectivity. The analysis borrows from post-humanist theory and media philosophy to explore how the production deconstructs conventional binaries of human/machine, real/virtual and presence/mediation. The main focus is how the play's sensory displacement and AI-facilitated narrative disrupt conventional anthropocentric models of consciousness and theatrical embodiment. Key research questions include: How does the play use AI and spatial sound to disrupt audience expectations of space and time? What subjectivities are engendered when mediated technology is at the heart of live performance? And how can the play itself perform a post-human subjectivity that goes beyond the stable, unified self? Methodologically, the article uses a close performance analysis of The Encounter with theoretical readings of post-humanism (Hayles, Braidotti), affect theory (Massumi) and media ecology (Hansen). The study's results imply that the play turns the observer from a passive spectator into an embodied system interface which mediates data blurring the sensory boundary between memory, fiction, and algorithmic presence. In the process, the production not only rewrites the ontological parameters of theatrical reality but also places the audience in a distributed, post-human consciousness.
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