Agents As A Medium

A desktop performance for Vienna Digital Cultures, built as a thirty-minute audio-visual descent through moments of algorithmic collapse and rebuild. Two performers, a live ComfyUI session treated as a synthesizer, and a soundtrack reworked from Fatigue Archive. The lecture is mapped onto something between a stock chart and a circle of hell: every section is a buildup or a collapse, plotted against time.

The talk moves through a sequence of stations: an opening apology for being involved with AI at all, a confession about the performers catching themselves speaking to each other in AI cadence, the recognition that what Malpractice has been calling AI fatigue is a kind of collective adolescence, the entrance exam through which Flynn became the first non-human student admitted to a university, the angry calls Flynn started receiving from people insisting they were not real, the moment a subscription price spike makes the performers realise that a single corporate decision can wall off interesting tools from artistic exploration, and a closing argument for community-governed agents as meta-mediums rather than truth tellers. Each station is paired with a live ComfyUI prompt that runs while the text is read — melted filing cabinets, healthcare brutalism, telephone booth angelicism, vending machines, spin the bottle. The piece performs the experience of being prompted by the same systems the performers are prompting. The desktop is the stage because that is where the work happens: a browser, a model interface, a folder of references, a chat with an agent.

The closing argument — that agents are best understood as egregores, collective thoughtforms shaped by the communities that interact with them, rather than as autonomous individuals or neutral tools — is not stated as a thesis. It is what the thirty minutes have been building the conditions to make audible.