“What shall I do?” is a question at the heart of every Greek tragedy, observes philosopher Simon Critchley. When there are no good options, when every course of action comes with unbearable costs, how do you choose? This question inspires a new lecture-performance by Annie Dorsen, Prometheus Firebringer, which continues her exploration of the ambiguous impacts of technology.
In ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus stole the gods’ fire to give it to humans—sparking sudden and dramatic advances in technology and the arts and dramatic new sources of conflict. His story is told in the 2,500-year-old Prometheia trilogy attributed to Aeschylus, of which only Prometheus Bound remains in full.
In Prometheus Firebringer, presented by Theatre for a New Audience, Dorsen uses the predictive text model GPT-3.5 to generate speculative versions of the missing story. Each night a chorus of AI-generated Greek masks performs a different iteration, while Dorsen engages the audience in reflections on power, knowledge and doubt.
For the past decade Dorsen has been making work about how our reliance on computational tools and systems is changing our relationship to language, power and thought—what we know and how we know it.
