From Cradle to Grave
Chatbots, Agents, Avatare
Performance
The performance was developed in 2025 and will premiere on March 27, 2026, in Dresden (Kulturhafen). It will be presented as part of the conference “Co-creating with AI.”
Performers
On stage are four actors and an operator, who visibly operates a computer for the audience. A projector displays different life decades, e.g., 0–10, 10–20, 20–30, and so on.
Performance flow
The audience is asked, for each life phase, which chatbots, agents, or avatars might play a role—for example, a virtual style advisor in teenage years, or a synthetic end-of-life companion in old age.
Depending on the audience’s choices, a corresponding bot is deployed as a voice-only AI. The scenes may be solo, duo, or multi-person, with the live AI always at the center.
In this way, the performance, with high audience participation, explores a possible future world in which human-machine interaction is relevant in every stage of life.
In the final act, a character, after death, encounters a “Peter AI,” which decides whether they go to heaven or hell.
The performance is designed as an entertaining public brainstorming session about the ubiquity of machines in our personal lives. The audience should laugh, but by the end also gain a nuanced sense of what it would be like if AI accompanied us throughout our entire lives.
Context
The performance dramatizes the rapid development of personalized bots in education, government administration, self-help, insurance, social credit systems, care robotics, and more. It critically addresses the infiltration of all life areas by AI, the delegation of administrative tasks to AI, the euphemism of “social robots,” and psychological phenomena such as parasocial relationships, overtrust, deskilling, and anthropomorphization.
The presentation is designed to be accessible and entertaining, allowing the audience to collectively and playfully immerse themselves in future scenarios.