Staging Algorithmic Governmentality: Annie Dorsen’s The Great Outdoors and Prometheus Firebringer

Abstract

This paper examines how algorithmic governmentality operates affectively and epistemically in Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre. Focusing on The Great Outdoors and Prometheus Firebringer, it explores how algorithms―and the digital infrastructures through which they operate―reshape perception, knowledge, and subjectivity. Drawing on Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns’s concept of algorithmic governmentality, the paper argues that Dorsen’s performances stage a shift from representational to computational governance. The Great Outdoors exposes affective governmentality through the algorithmic modulation of online emotions, while Prometheus Firebringer reveals epistemic governmentality by juxtaposing AI-generated text with Dorsen’s lecture-performance, exposing a crisis of authorship, interpretation, and knowledge in the era of generative AI. Rather than delivering narrative or ideological critique directly, Dorsen’s theatre creates sensory encounters with algorithmic processes, transforming computation into aesthetic experience―a sensory and reflective encounter that renders algorithmic operations perceptible and experiential―and prompting reflection on the political and ethical stakes of human subjectivity in an increasingly algorithmic world.