I'm a Robot and I need Therapy Marina Orlova

I’m a Robot and I need Therapy is an experimental performance that crosses ideas of neurodiversity and data feminism and offers a critical and ironic view on modern society���s approach to technology, ethics, empathy and the mental health care system.  It includes a live therapy session for a “mentally unstable AI” and perspectives of “human agents”: AI-therapist, tech start-up CEO, hacker, AI’s girlfriend. Within the tragicomic genre it questions agency, subjectivity and power relations and draws parallels with the field of psychiatry, based on autobiographical material and personal experiences of being a neurodivergent artist and a psychiatric survivor. AI is engineered for this project and trained with a unique dataset; it generates text in real time and therefore becomes an improvisation partner.

Marina Orlova is an independent dance/theatre maker and dramaturg. After receiving education in sociology in Moscow (‘09), Marina has been studying dance (since ‘12). She graduated from SNDO at the Amsterdam Academy of Theatre and Dance (‘21). Her main topics are mental health, tech ethics and migration; her aesthetics - tragicomedy and absurdism. Marina’s current artistic practice also includes writing, teaching and facilitating a support group for “artists in distress”. Since 2020 Marina is applying Data feminist approach to create political chatbot-performers: non-European AI, neurodivergent AI. With her ongoing anti-disciplinary research Marina mediates engineering logic and theatre apparatus in order to explore the process of meaning-making at the collision of the two worlds.