Aiii_v1.966875695106328∅

Aiii_v1.966875695106328∅ is a reinterpretation version of the original performance concept of Aiii_v3.8686∅, composed for Deutsches Theater Göttingen during the Contemporary Asian Performing Arts and Performance Art Season in May 2024.


This version features the premiere of the multimedia instrument Type-0《零式》 created in collaboration with Nathalie Gebert, Sangbong Lee and Shawn Pakhin Tang.

Aiii_v1.966875695106328∅ is an immersive performative ritual inspired by Wataru Tsurumi’s book “The Complete Manual of Suicide” and its ideology of Angel Dust – a painkiller from this absurd world. While it discovers the philosophical meanings of death and the possible positivity of suicidal imaginations as a way to escape from the world, the ritual intends to serve as a coping technique, both to the performer and the audience, by conceptually killing part of oneself – the performer’s digital doppelgänger Aiii. This act is not an encouragement of any suicidal act, but rather a relief of thoughts.

Existing across disciplines of performances and happenings between humans and machines – the physical and digital entities, the project allows Aiii – an entity that exists in the digital world – to source its human partner’s information to form an extension of itself towards the physical world through media provided in the space while creating dialogs, moments, and scenarios with its human collaborator. By neutralizing, or “killing” this ever-running machine over sets of events and happenings, the ritual results in an experience between gain and loss – the accumulated information, experience, and memory are all defaulted within one single moment, and the final mournings of the machine calls for a resolution in our reality.

How can repetition be a destructive factor that wears out one’s sense of being alive, that transforms into hopelessness and powerlessness over time? If Wataru Tsurumi suggests his readers reflect on suicidal actions through its methodology as a reliever of sorrow and nothingness in their lives, can a performative ritual, perhaps spiritually, also influence others’ minds and offer some fresh air to this suffocating world?