squared
AI will eventually surpass the human brain but getting jokes ... that could take time. (Geoffrey Hinton)
Exploring A/I Artistic Intelligence
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method,
one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. (Donna Haraway)
ABOUT
Antje Budde 安琪。布徳
Antje Budde is a conceptual, queer-feminist, interdisciplinary experimental scholar-artist and the Artistic Research Director of the (Digital Dramaturgy Lab)squared, currently working and living on traditionally Indigenous land in Tkaronto. (Toronto, Province of Ontario, Canada)
Treaty information HERE
Antje also works as an Associate Professor of Theatre Sciences (Theaterwissenschaften), Cultural Communication and Modern Chinese Studies at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Toronto.
Antje has created multi-disciplinary artistic works in Germany, China and Canada and works tri-lingually in German, English and Mandarin.
Antje is the founder of a number of queerly feminist performing art projects including most recently the (DDL)2 or (Digital Dramaturgy Lab)Squared - a platform for experimental explorations of digital culture, creative labor, integration of arts and science, and technology in/as performance, interested in the intersections of natural sciences, the arts, engineering and computer science.
A youth educational trip to the concentration camp museum’s site of Ravensbrück at the age of 13 fundamentally changed her outlook on life and death, the politics of the everyday and provoked an honest, consequential commitment to social change. Equally important was the oral history, transmitted through family, about the experience of war, displacement, cold war, separation, capitalist and socialist authoritarian oppression. Her experience with the East German civil disobedience movement of the late 1980s, that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, deeply informed her approach to learning, artistic expression, research creation and matters of social justice.
As a result, Antje is more interested in positions of empowerment than in positions of power, more interested in a round table than a podium.
That, along with a Brechtian understanding of the pleasure of learning, Hannah Arendt’s explorations of the human condition, Angela Davis’ queer black power of action and philosophical thought, Sarah Ahmed’s ideas around queering willfulness, Judith Butler's theatrical machines, J. Halberstam's notions of the queer art of failure, bell hooks' sophisticated critique of postmodern theory, guide her engagement with the world and the labor of becoming. Nina Hagen singing Bertolt Brecht/Hanns Eisler is also on her mind: Im Gefängnis zu singen (To sing in prison)
Laurie Anderson's and Lou Reed's three rules in life are useful to consider:
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Don't be afraid of anyone.
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Get a really good bullshit detector and learn how to use it.
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Be really, really tender.
(Laurie Anderson Acceptance Speech On Behalf Of Lou Reed at the 2015 Hall of Fame Ceremony)
Laughter, as a major critical instrument of de-centering one's thoughts/knowledges/importance is central (dialectical conundrum intended).
Antje has little patience for demagogues, opportunists, bullies and manipulators.
Information about previous work with the former Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL) can be found HERE.