Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

In the 21st century, the performance culture of critique has transformed with the increasing implementation of AI technologies upon which the operative functions of data capitalism are built. Operating within the performance-based culture industry, the works of Trevor Paglen, Gerald Nestler/Sylvia Eckermann, and Vladan Joler respond critically to data capitalism’s modes of data extraction and how the societal performances of capitalism condition people’s physical and digital performances.

“Performing AI” raises new questions about creative labor. Might the mathematical entities called neural networks that constitute much contemporary AI research be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and nonhuman machines? What human societal models do neural networks enact? What bodily, mental, and affective work is required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts?

The way robots move often evokes horror. Dance—as an embodied, movement-based art form open to possibility—can expand motion-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) beyond popular approaches based on anthropomorphism and late-capitalist efficiency. The “super-machinic” robotic system coopts human-centered movement and perpetuates neoliberal capitalist agendas. Dance offers a provocation for HRI and an invitation to reimagine how we move.

If computer programming languages can be used to control the movement of robots, they can therefore be used as choreographic notations. Weaving, dance, and musical forms can be taken as places of inspiration for this, bringing together patterns, computation, movement, and notation in live telematic performance involving live coding of both audience and robots.

At the institutional and individual level, interest is growing in theatre and performance studies digital humanities (DH) projects. Too often, this interest fizzles out in the leap from digital imaginings to production timelines that real people must execute (with real budgets). A thorough understanding of the labor structures that drive such projects is necessary in developing realistic, sustainable models of DH work.

The tendency to reduce the movements of performers in media art to data results in a flattening of identities and makes the performers’ essence seemingly insignificant. Two case studies showcase what might be lost through datafication, even as they resist it: Lucinda Childs “walking” in Bach 6 Solo by Robert Wilson, and Michael Jackson standing still at the start of his 1993 Super Bowl Halftime show. The desire to detach the body from aesthetic significance can be traced back to America’s historical racism.

A poetic provocation that considers the embodied tone and feel of humans contra machines.

Discussion of “digital performance” is preoccupied with themes of fluidity, variation, ambiguity, and resistance to rigid categorization. And yet these themes correspond more closely to analog principles. The digital ethos indicates regularity, precision, and the elimination of ambivalence. The rationalized industrial practices of stage management, blocking and, in particular, lighting cues prioritize the precisely timed and accurate reproduction of stage images through the instant recall of digital memory.

While dance has captured attention across platforms and media, remuneration is constrained by copyright issues, a devaluation of dance as a product, and racism. Media coverage of economic, labor, and crediting concerns in popular dance is a critical part of the circuit of creation, discourse, and culture-shifts in online dance. Coverage has an important role in an age of online organizing and the exposure economy, while it simultaneously extracts value from the creators being covered.

Under lockdown in a boarding school in China, students staged a performance based on poetry written by Chinese migrant workers. The poems guided an exploration of biotechnical interdependencies in and between local and global environments and the composition of the resistance script and movement score of laboring bodies embedded in the poems.

The world is going through processes of change that emphasize the role of affect in fueling political mobilization and collective protest. Distinctive geopolitical affects emerge in different territories: Can affect both perform and sustain social change?

In this digital video supplement to the issue, Lisa Müller-Trede restages a 2022 performance in which she hired an actor to deliver her talk and then interrupted “her” talk at a conference on affective computing—an event that bursts open the academic norms that forbid consideration of the violent uses to which AI research, especially when connected to human bodies, can lend itself.