#2 Human Algorhythm Games [WhatsApp Studies]
WhatsApp Studies is a series of works that critically explores the different uses of the instant messaging app WhatsApp as a creative tool for developing interactive scenarios. Each study proposes a scenic device in which the audience’s permanent connection is integrated as sonic, visual and dramaturgical material: the smartphone is no longer an object external to the performance space, but the instrument that constructs and modifies the experience in real time.
Credits:
KlexosLab
Composition and production | Juanma Palao y Alejandro Álvarez
Klexos Ensemble | Pablo González, Javier Juanals, Jesús Gallardo y Carlos Tena
Technician | Juanma Palao
WhatsApp administrator | Alejandro Álvarez
In Human Algorhythm Games, this approach takes the form of a participatory game that reverses the Turing test: here, the aim is not to determine whether a machine can appear human, but to test whether the audience itself is capable of proving its humanity. Through a WhatsApp group, audience members receive polls, instructions, tests and audiovisual materials that they must answer or carry out in real time, thereby conditioning the development of the work and the activation of different sonic, visual and scenic materials.
Under its playful appearance, the piece unfolds a critical reflection on artificial intelligence, the automation of behaviour, obedience and the gamification of contemporary experience. However, its final twist radically shifts the meaning of the device: the true winners are not those who correctly follow the rules, but those who refuse to obey them blindly. The work thus proposes an open question about the human in the algorithmic era, suggesting that perhaps one of its last forms of resistance is still the capacity to doubt, deviate and disobey.
