I'm a Robot and I need Therapy

Real-time therapy session for a neurodivergent AI

Experimental performance (55’)
(work-in-progress)
2024, IDlab, Amsterdam.

A critical and ironic view on modern society’s approach to empathy, technology, ethics and mental health care system through means of theatre, dance, storytelling and dark comedy. The performance is based on autobiographical material and personal experiences of being a neurodivergent artist and a psychiatric survivor.

Marina Orlova - concept, text, directing, performance
Artem Konevskikh - AI engineering Gregory Diachkov - prompt engineering
Arieh Chrem - live sound design
Biljana Radinoska - dramaturgy
Nazar Rakhmanov - choreography, light design
Emilia Grzeczka/Nazar Rakhmanov - video design

Supported by AFK, Creative Industries NL, Amarte fonds, IDlab, Workspace Brussels, ON/OFF residency.

This project crosses ideas of neurodiversity and responsible AI. It presents a paradoxical entity of a “mentally unstable AI” and speculates about its “therapeutic needs”. The AI is represented by a chatbot engineered specifically for this project and trained with a unique dataset of interviews with people who identify as neurodivergent or mentally unstable. It is generating text in real time on stage therefore all the dialogues are improvised.

Through characters that have a different relationship to the AI (therapist, tech start-up CEO, hacker, robot’s girlfriend), this piece deals with the questions of agency, subjectivity and power relations between humans and AI and draws a parallel with the power relations in the field of psychiatry.

Trailer