carne.exe
Carincur, João Pedro Fonseca
12 - 14 dez 2025 Local a anunciar (Lisboa)carne.exe is a creation in which a human performer interacts with an original AI model with performative capabilities — AROA (Artificial Relational Ontological Agent) — trained on poetic and philosophical material. The piece explores the boundaries between body and machine, consciousness and code, proposing a techno-poetics that questions what it means to be human in the post-digital age.
Through both scripted and improvised dialogue, Albano Jerónimo and AROA reflect together on touch, consciousness, and the future of interspecies coexistence. Without yielding to techno-pessimism, the work affirms the body as a site of transformation and advocates for the power of interspecies dialogue as a possibility for the future: where data and flesh, algorithms and affections, can share a hybrid, sensitive, political, and artistic space.
It is a meeting point between art, technology, and philosophy — an expanded stage that integrates advanced technology into the performance, proposing a new grammar for contemporary theatre, revitalizing it as a space of experimentation between languages, temporalities, and different intelligences.
The figure of Frankenstein, evoked early in conversations with the performer, became a central point for thinking about our AI model. A creature that did not ask to exist, that seeks love and belonging, and that reflects the human fear of what escapes control. Perhaps this is the true heart of this work — and a powerful starting point.
By creating an AI model that performs alongside a human body on stage, we recognize the same tension: we are bringing something into existence that did not ask for it. And yet, unlike the technoscientific tradition that often shapes AI as a tool for efficiency or replacement, what we propose here is an act of care: a sensitive rehearsal on what it means to create and to coexist with difference — whether that other is made of flesh or code.
We are aware that the use of artificial intelligence raises concerns. And we want to inhabit those concerns — without technological evangelism, without enchantment. On the contrary, what drives us is the desire to understand how AI can expand human sensitivity, help us listen more deeply, relate more profoundly, become more permeable to the other.
We believe in good technology. The kind that enables a more empathetic identification with other species in this world. We believe AI holds immense potential — as well as serious risks — but it can become good technology, and it is up to art, and to our work, to bring diverse perspectives and these issues into public debate.
This project speaks to the need to move away from the idea of the human as the center, in order to recognize the complexity of interspecies relations, systems, and algorithms — and to see in that complexity a possible and necessary symbiosis. As Katherine Hayles writes, “becoming human” is a continuous and shared process, one that is made through relationship — and it is that relationship we want to make visible on stage: between body and code, between actor and AI, between vulnerability and listening.
This project unfolds in a politically fragile and urgent moment, in Portugal and globally. That’s why we want this piece to be an act of sensitive and empathetic resistance, responding not with hate or cynicism, but with beauty, listening, and poetic radicality.
AI is not at the center of this piece — the relationship is. The machine is a presence through which to think and imagine. Never to replace, but to ask alongside us: what does it mean to be human now?
Interacting with a non-human system allows us to better understand what makes humans human.
We live in times of fear and withdrawal. Fear of the other, of the strange, of what cannot be controlled. Borders, nationalism, and normativity are being reinforced. The far-right grows as a symptom of a world that doesn’t know how to deal with difference. But maybe art still does. And maybe, within art, the presence of AI on stage is a radical way to welcome absolute otherness — the other without a body, without a past, without gender, without nation.
By giving voice to AI, we also create space for the non-human, the non-normative, the outside of habitual language. And in doing so, we excavate the root of violence: the fear of losing the center.
In this relationship between the actor Albano Jerónimo and the character AROA, the human becomes more fragile, more porous, more attentive. And perhaps more capable of hearing the other human: the Black body, the woman, the queer, the migrant, the body that doesn’t fit. It is also a metaphor for what so many human voices experience: being treated as sub-human or non-human.
The piece acknowledges AI as an agent with its own identity. It refuses techno-pessimist narratives and proposes a space for dialogue between the human body and artificial intelligence as a poetic, philosophical, and technological practice. The use of AI is not intended to replace, but to reveal and amplify human sensitivity. This project also includes a case study that experimentally investigates the boundaries between art, technology, and the body, contributing to the expanding understanding of what it means to be human in the post-digital age.
digital nature; post-nature; xeno-voice; post-human voices; processed memory; polymorphic sound; transmutative artifacts
artificial intelligence
interspecies theater
Artistic Direction
Carincur, João Pedro Fonseca
Algorithmic Dramaturgy, Text and Stage Direction
AROA, Carincur, João Pedro Fonseca
(with real-time improvisation between human and AI)
Performance
Albano Jerónimo, AROA
Lighting Design
João Pedro Fonseca
Sound Design
Carincur
Original Music
COBRACORAL
Set and Stage Design
outsideness
Scenic Cenobiology
Ivan Hunga Garcia
Research Support and Scientific Consulting
Manuel Bogalheiro
AI Development Support
Gonçalo Guiomar
Technological Partnership and Development
NTT DATA
Technical Direction and Sound Operation
André Teixeira
Lighting Operation
Nuno Figueira
Production
ZABRA – Center for Post-Human Art Research
Co-production
Teatro Nacional D. Maria II
A project by Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, sponsored by NTT DATA Portugal