The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence, and Posthumanist Aesthetics

Abstract

This research project is situated at the intersections of art history and theory, and draws on performance studies. It starts from a critique of how AI technologies have been increasingly implemented in society. This has led to a form of “cybernetic capitalism”, whose algorithmic operations are to 80 % programmed by men, and which significantly impact gender, sex, and race-based forms of discrimination, besides accelerating the automation of specific human labour. In light of this context, my project develops an original materialist feminist framework to analyse how interdisciplinary artistic performance practices have incorporated generative and embodied AI technologies in their body-based work over the last decade. The project develops the notion of “performance critique” to analyse differences and similarities between bodily (identity-based) and machinic intelligence. On the one hand, I explore how artistic performance works make visible the structural impact of AI technologies on the mechanisms of social discrimination and how kinaesthetic performances with AI shape processes of subjectification, and on the other hand, I investigate what form of posthumanist aesthetics this brings forth.

Short biography

Lisa Moravec is an art historian-performance scholar, critic, and curator. She works at the intersections of the visual and performing arts, with a focus on human, animal, and machine agency. As senior postdoc at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she leads the FWF research project “The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence, and Posthumanist Aesthetics”. Over the past three years, she has been a fellow at steirischer herbst and has received several grants for her first postdoc project on “Kunst mit Eigen-Sinn”, building on her long-standing engagement with the work of Rose English and feminism as a form of societal critique. As a curator, she launched the live/podcast discourse programme and organised the symposium Artists' Archives and Estates at the Academy for the gallery festival “Curated By” (2024). She initiated/co-curated the performance exhibition, “Suddenly Begin in Splendour: Rose English, Performance, Presence, Spectacle”, its surrounding performance programme, and ex. cat. (Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 2024 – May 2025). Since 2017, she has taught at several British, Austrian, and German universities and art schools. 

Publications: “Dressaged Animality: Human and Animal Actors in ContemporaryPerformance” (Routledge, 2024), book translation “What is Vienna Actionism?” (DVC, 2025), the co-ed. vol. “Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices” (Bloomsbury, 2025), several peer-reviewed journal articles, ex.cat. texts, and art/performance criticism e.g. in “springerin”, “Studio International, Burlington Review, Texte zur Kunst”, and “Spike”.