Another in Forced Entertainment’s engagements with what AI means to art, Cold Sweat starts at the end of an office party, or perhaps ends at the start of an office party. The 3 performers wear differing costumes, and move about the space with repetitive movements and gestures, lip synching to AI voices who repeat themselves. They repeat each other’s text, loop in text, in a manner that becomes alternatingly hypnotising and irritating, back and forth. It is a true test of attention - the objects creating meaning, losing it, and regaining it. Simple acts such as piling cups, putting away bottles, showing outsized cards, all feel familiar and yet completely foreign when accompanied by the AI droning American-accented voices. Even the AI has glottal fry.
There’s always an energy at a Forced show. There are those who are there and “up for it”, ready for the mental challenge. Then inevitably there are some who either don’t know what their friends have brought them to, or ended here by accident. Inevitably, there are walkouts. The repetition, the complete lack of meaning (that if you pay attention, becomes meaning itself) is a lot for our minds to grapple with. And yet those who love it, love it.
For me, it is the imperfection. The complete lack of polish. The freedom for the luck of how and when something happens to be pure accident, and that in itself creates meaning and imagery, context. But never story. Why would we want that?