The Configurator
Performance
The performance is a homage to Erich Kästner’s “Synthetic Man” and was presented once on April 26, 2024, at the Erich Kästner Museum in Dresden as part of the event “Kästnerverses. A Journey Through Time in the Anniversary Year.” It lasted approximately 90 minutes.
Performers
At least two actors from the improvisational theater group Freie Spielkultur performed on stage. One person was equipped with a headset during the performance, through which they received the artificial intelligence’s responses from the operator. They simultaneously spoke and embodied these responses as a cyborg on stage. In an adjoining room, visible to the audience, the operator was at a computer. They controlled the actors’ input and the AI’s output. The inputs and outputs of the actors and AI were projected simultaneously onto a screen, allowing the audience to follow the dialogue.
Performance Flow
The performance “The Configurator” combined improvisational theater with artificial intelligence, inviting the audience on a joint expedition between humans and machines. After a scientific introduction explaining the experiment and its research framework, an artistic opening set the tone for the evening with Erich Kästner’s poem “The Synthetic Human.”
The performance then presented a series of improvisation formats that progressively explored the interplay between human creativity and machine interaction. At first, the actors performed without any technical assistance. As the performance went on, the AI gradually took over increasing parts of the play. One actor was equipped with headphones and received the AI’s responses in real time, which they simultaneously spoke and embodied on stage. In an adjacent room—visible to the audience—the operator controlled the dialogue flow and prompts via computer. All text inputs and outputs from both the actors and the AI were projected live onto a screen, allowing the audience to follow the dialogue as it unfolded.
The performance followed a dramaturgical progression: it began with purely human improvisations and evolved through hybrid scenes into moments where the AI took creative control. Among the formats were a “freeze game” with proverbs, a Reclam game based on Kästner’s theater texts, collaborative storytelling with the AI, genre experiments, scenes with shifting personality imitations, and the so-called “ABC game” with fixed linguistic rules. The evening concluded with a scene entirely generated by the AI and physically performed by the actors.
After the show, the audience was invited to interact directly with the AI and co-create a fairy tale. Additionally, pre- and post-performance surveys were conducted by the Chair of Psychological Methods and Cognitive Modeling to measure how the participants’ attitudes toward artificial intelligence changed through the performance. The collected data were analyzed as part of a master’s thesis.
Background
The performance is an expedition between human and machine, between reality and imagination. The audience is invited not only to watch but to actively co-create an experience that dissolves the boundaries between the two spheres. Together with the performers, a space emerges in which the creative encounter between human and artificial intelligence unfolds. It reveals what it means to be creative in a time when possibilities are constantly changing.
For the 125th anniversary of Erich Kästner’s birth, The Answering Machine follows the traces of his poem “The Synthetic Human.” In the format “The Configurator,” a collaboration with the Erich Kästner House for Literature, the improvisation theater group Freie Spielkultur, and DIE BÜHNE e.V. – the theater of TU Dresden – performers and audience come together in a shared experiment with artificial intelligence.