Philip Auslander : Live from Cyberspace (p. 2)

4. The OED defines the word "live" by saying: "Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc." Chatterbot performances are certainly live according to this definition. 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 data bases, their individual performances are responsive to the actions of other performers, autonomous, unpredictable, and improvisational. That is, they perform in the moment.

5. The magnitude of the challenge chatterbots pose to current conceptions of liveness becomes evident when we consider how both the ontology and the value of live performance have been construed in performance theory, which often invokes the performers materiality and mortality to describe liveness in existential terms. In Blooded Thought, Herbert Blau declares dramatically that "In a very strict sense, it is the actors mortality which is the actual subject [of any performance], for he is right there dying in front of your eyes. . . ." Peggy Phelan echoes some of the same themes in Mourning Sex: "Live performance and theatre ('art with real bodies') persist despite an economy of reproduction that makes them seem illogical and certainly a poor investment...it may well be that theatre and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for death."

6. Clearly, performances by bots cannot address these ideas in the same way as those by human performers. Since bots are virtual entities, they have no physical presence, no corporeality; they are not dying in front of our eyes--they are, in fact, immortal. Bots can be destroyed or taken out of service, but they do not age or die in any biological sense. They perform live, but they are not a-live, at least not in the same way that organic entities are alive. Performances by bots therefore do not engage existential issues simply by virtue of the performers' presence, in the way Blau and Phelan describe human performances. If, as I've already indicated, the chatterbot does not demand a new definition of live performance, it does remind us of what is basic to existing definitions. Returning to the OED, we can see that liveness is first and foremost a temporal relationship, a relationship of simultaneity: "Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence..." The ability to present performances that can be watched as they occur, or, to switch to a technological vocabulary, to perform in real time--the heart of the concept of liveness--is an ability shared by human beings and chatterbots. The appearance of the Internet chatterbot therefore does not occasion a redefinition of liveness. But what the chatterbot does occasion 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.

This is an excerpt from a longer essay which is to appear in PAJ's forthcoming issue on performance and new media.

Philip Auslander is the author of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Presence and Resistance, and From Acting to Performance.