Mining Hate

On Mining Hate, I worked as technical director and designer, building the systems that let the audience become part of the show. Alongside director and performer Varoon P. Anand, we took documentary material around coordinated attacks on journalists and minorities in India and deconstructed them into a live, interactive performance with different multimedia and technology elements.

One big aspect of the live technology on stage was creating a live deepfake pipeline that could work in real time, in a theatre, with no room for error. Working alongside creative technologists Denny George and Hasan S., we built a system using Gooey.ai that recorded a few seconds of an audience member's face during the performance and generated a live AI fake image of them on stage. This was not a pre-recorded effect. It happened in front of the audience, while they watched, turning their own face into part of the show's argument about how easily images can be manipulated and weaponized.

We also built a closed loop polling system so audiences could interact and vote using their own devices, and gamified this into a version of Twitter trolling. The aim was to let people experience, in a small and contained way, what it feels like to participate in the kind of coordinated harassment campaigns the show was investigating. Turning this into something playable meant audiences understood the mechanics of online hate from the inside, not just as something described to them on stage.
Designing for this show meant constantly testing where technology could explain an idea better than a performer's words could. The tools we built were not there to impress an audience with what was possible. They were there to make a point about misinformation, harassment and the fragility of digital identity feel immediate and personal.

This work also meant solving practical problems most theatre technical roles never face. We needed processing fast enough to generate the AI images within the runtime of a scene, and systems reliable enough to run the same way every night across different cities and different audiences. Touring this show through Hamburg, Göttingen and Bonn meant rebuilding and testing these systems in new technical environments each time.