Silicon Evolution

Two essays in this issue of TDR explore AI. Diana Taylor reexamines her by now classical distinction between the “archive and the repertoire” in terms of how digital technologies “have complicated Western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment, liveness, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of authority, copyright, history, and preservation (linked to the archive)” (2024:25). Kathy Fang, winner of this year’s TDR Student Essay Contest, notes how ChatGPT moves “beyond performance as traced by its citationality towards performance as recursive in its iterability” (2024:133). Both these essays, and the plethora of other thinking about AI, relate deeply to my “restoration of behavior,” wherein there is no original (Schechner 1985).

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