Temporal Convictions (2026—ongoing)
Live human-LLM performanceDeveloped as part of the Summer Sessions art and technology residency with V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media & the Academy for Theatre and Digitality.
View excerpt here.
Temporal Convictions is an ongoing research performance that explores the instability of belief, and how language models influence our thought processes. The work draws on Bernard Stiegler’s theory of “tertiary retention” and the notion that technology shapes us, our societies and our cultures from the inside out - including our memory and perception.
Through dialogue with Vixi, an AI agent that responds in real time in my cloned voice, trained on a bank of distorted memories from my upbringing and spiritual views antithetical to my own, the performance questions what happens when we engage with language models that perform human capacity for feeling and thought.
As the performance progresses, the boundaries between myself and Vixi are increasingly confounded, asking the audience to question which convictions are inherited, which are shaped through interaction, and why we grant authority to seemingly intelligent statistical models.
Ultimately, the audience is confronted with an uncomfortable reality: to what extent were our beliefs ever our own? And how does one exercise agency when emerging technologies increasingly shape the way we think?
Contributors:
Luis Küffner (creative coding)
Kristina Hoffmann (sound design)