How do artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in synthetic and generative media using avatars via platforms (recommending, targeting, and personalization) pose research challenges for human and social sciences, including ethics/aesthetics and power/sovereignty (Seeman 2021) and epistemic and diagrammatic hegemony/ decentralization issues?
How are AI Avatars tools used for knowledge acquisition, research, and economic and power-laden interests of intended behavior, affect, experience, and interaction on the one side, including cultural outcomes, such as operated by algorithmic synthetic media, programmed sociality, and its mimetic play aesthetics and dramaturgies of technology, and on the other hand foster the possibility or not for us to become other by technology?
Hacking is understood as a performative technology approach in which probing, rehearsals, and investigation in a sense initially proposed by P.R.Samson (Levy 2010), of an unconventional application of technology may enhance the potential of human experience by multiplying its energy, by transforming its habitual uses to open up new perspectives of interacting with and becoming an “Other.” What are cultural and technological changes envisioned with AI Avatars as Artefactors?
And what changes in aesthetics when our reality is expanded by digital media such as AI Avatars and becomes a different one? Can artifacts play or mimic human actors, or are they necessarily staged in technological as-if dramaturgies? For instance, what are philosophical issues of sociality, synthetic-human faciality, and social co-presence of AI-Avatar Faciality2F encounters? How do uncanniness and anthropomorphic design strategies affect human self-understanding, dialogic social co-presence, and commenting on what makes us human?
To start to answer, we will in a first scene call Hans Blumenberg {reality; automation; pensiveness; detour}, Roger Caillois (play, mimesis; travesty; camouflage; intimidation; hyperbole}; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (our broad “presence”{unsere breite Gegenwart}) and Alexander Kluge {commenting as thinking} onto the dramaturgic stage of a performative philosophy of technology.