AntifAI: German Horror Daemonium

Video

AntifAI: German Horror Daemonium probes what an antifascist artificial intelligence could be, and whether the promise of machine learning can be turned against the structures that produce right-wing violence. The starting point is a contradiction: AI works by categorising, distinguishing and selecting, the same operations that underpin discriminatory systems. Working from antifascist datasets of photographs, texts and video, cobratheater.cobra tests whether that machinery can instead serve a democratic civil society founded on an antifascist consensus.

The work takes the form of a theatrical, audio-visual installation built as a horror cabinet of German conditions. An avatar guides the audience through a labyrinthine stage set that doubles as a ghost train through the internet. Its route is decided by an AI written by the collective and changes with every performance: one turn leads to the hacker garage of right-wing terrorism, another to a map of right-wing violence in Germany, another into online gaming or live Twitter data. The production places the history of far-right violence in Germany and the unbroken resistance to it alongside the new tools that might contest it.

The piece premiered in June 2021 as an online-only production at the Junges Schauspielhaus Bochum. Up to ten spectators at a time were led through the set on the open-source platform Jitsi, where a chatbot let the audience interact with the performers and with the AI itself. In March 2022 the collective expanded the work into a hybrid format for analogue and digital audiences, first at ARGEkultur Salzburg within the FIGHT THE RIGHT programme, then at the WUK Theater Quartier in Halle (Saale) during the Bildungswochen gegen Rassismus. Each performance ended with an extended discussion in which the production team introduced the individual stations and opened the questions to the room.

AntifAI: German Horror Daemonium is a production by cobratheater.cobra with the Junges Schauspielhaus Bochum and the JES Stuttgart, developed within the project Haus der digitalen Antifaschist*innen. It was funded through the Fonds Doppelpass of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, with the hybrid format supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste from funds of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR. The work leaves its central question open: an AI assembled from antifascist material is only ever as antifascist as the people who train, interrogate and deploy it.