Thursday, October 1 at 4:00 pm
UB Humanities Institute and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center present
Join us for the inaugural Scholars@Hallwalls talk of the 2026-27 season! Complimentary beverages and light fare are served for a brief, pre-talk mingling session.
4:00pm | Mingling
4:15pm | Introductions and featured talk followed by Q + A
We hope you'll join us in-person for the good camraderie and conversation, but you can also join the livestream via the Hallwalls website.
My talk proposes that the study of theatre, a form and practice steeped in artifice, can help us grapple with and find nuance in anxieties around generative AI's fakeness. Using the work of conceptual artist Gillian Wearing as an illuminating site, I propose that when generative AI creates persuasive synthetic representations, or presents the illusion of human likeness or labor, it acts theatrically—and usefully. The talk argues for fakeness as itself a valuable methodology, and for the importance of distinguishing between a well-rehearsed, deeply familiar antipathy toward the fake and artificial and the demonstrated harms and substantive threats that attend artificial intelligence’s development and deployment.
Lindsay Brandon Hunter writes about the intersections of (usually digital) media and performance. She is the author of Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief (Northwestern University Press, 2021), and of essays published or forthcoming in the volumes Futures of Theatrical Experience and The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Theatre, as well as the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, the International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, and the online journal Amodern. The working title of her second, in-progress monograph is Fake People: Theatricality, AI, and Human Likeness. She's also an actor and director and works as an intimacy choreographer for live performance.