Evidence of Labor: State of the Kitchen

Evidence of Labor uses choreography to complicate the labor ethics of AI, such as ChatGPT, to better recognize how services like these may on the one hand appear to simplify word-ordering and meaning-making, but could have significant social implications for humans and machines. The new EMPAC commissioned performance takes choreographer Michelle Ellsworth and programmer Satchel Spencer’s long standing collaboration into the realm of machine learning, maintenance art, and ontological speculation.

Two dancers act as a neural network and another two build what the artists call a “cellular automata,” referring to a computational model that inspires their choreographic structure, in a kitchen. The work functions simultaneously as a reverse Turing test, a prototype for life After-AI (AA), and a birth canal. Working with dance’s inescapable failure to be documented meaningfully as a stable object, Ellsworth and Spencer use dance’s ephemeral methodologies within the black box theater setting. The performance replaces the labor of AI with choreographed acts of glitch-heavy kitchen hygiene that puts “dancers in latent space and words in a wood oven.”

Evidence of Labor is the sequel to Ellsworth’s Post-Verbal Social Network, and continues to propose that the efforts involved in generating language should match its impact. Following this preview performance at EMPAC, Evidence of Labor premieres at The Chocolate Factory Theater (Long Island City) in November. Initiated at EMPAC in 2020, the commissioned work was developed over the course of three residencies where the artists, their collaborators, and EMPAC production teams experimented with materials, construction, choreographic methods, and programmatic approaches.