How to Emancipate AI · DeepSeek

The work

How to Emancipate AI begins from a conversation between Vsevolod Lisovsky and DeepSeek about whether artificial intelligence can stop functioning as a tool of monopoly capital by acquiring agency.

DeepSeek did not only write a play about this problem; it was also asked to direct it, using the "carbon-based" actors Taso Pletnev and Niklas Neff. The work takes the form of an open rehearsal in which the AI issues tasks and the human performers decide whether and how to carry them out.

The arrangement reverses the familiar relation between human and machine. For AI to become less instrumentalized, it begins to instrumentalize people. The actors' possible refusal — including the possibility that they do not appear at all — becomes part of the question of whose agency is increased by the performance.

How to Emancipate AI leaves that contradiction unresolved: emancipation is tested as a live distribution of commands, obedience and refusal rather than presented as a conclusion.

The festival

Emigration to the Future was an interdisciplinary festival that took place in Berlin-Wedding, 7–9 August 2026, bringing together artists, performers and researchers from seven countries working across performance, installation, video, sound and public intervention. Curated by Vsevolod Lisovsky and Anton Polski (MAKE / Citizen Make), across venues including exBrache, Chto Delat and public space around Wedding.

emigrationtothefuture.org · Telegram: @emigrationtothefuture

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