Seminar: Theatre as we might remember it, had we ever seen it

Brian Gothong Tan's representations of performances that never happened, with Paul Rae, University of Melbourne

From January 2023, Singaporean artist and theatre-maker Brian Gothong Tan (B. 1980) began experimenting with what Antonio Somani (2021:154) calls the ‘camera-less photography’ of generative AI-based images. Performances and pseudo-theatrical ensembles featured prominently in the resulting series, which do not represent specific historical figures or moments, but are instead composites of the countless images within the AI application’s repository. Tan went on to use the same technology to visualise the cultural component of Singapore's 2024 National Day Parade, which he directed.

In this paper, I considered the meanings of Tan’s strikingly beautiful but apparently superficial images. In particular, I focus on their relationship to documentation of actual theatrical events, and the nuances of a Southeast Asian artist drawing on a massive data set that has been widely criticised for its racial biases. In the context of the Asian Cultural Research Hub gathering, I will be particularly interested in to engage with the audience about their responses and interpretations of the images.

More information in the poster below: