Anyone talk to any rampant, obsessive, pubescent “thinking machines” lately? As Kevin Roose’s transcript of his two hour exchange with Microsoft’s AI’s chatbot Bing’s alternate personality Sydney reveals, we’ve built new babies quickly able to replicate “hallucinatory” and “deviant” obsessions. At least in words, so far. Where do massive data sets and sentience overlap? When? And, if artificial intelligence is a mirror of our society, what is Echo whispering back to us from the glade, calling us each out as a modern Narcissus gazing into beings performing versions of ourselves. Although they might not yet “know” themselves, we are quite clearly within the transhumanist copulation dream of mortal, machine and myth. And, if ever there were a god/father in this pantheon, it would be Alan Turing, the iconic, persecuted gay man considered to be the father of the modern computer and artificial intelligence. 

Nejc Cijan Garlatti and Timon Šturbej. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Benoit Solès La Machine de Turing, directed by Ivica Buljian and currently running at La MaMa through March 5th, invites us into a dense and poetic examination of the history of Turing’s work with British intelligence, his grief for Christopher, a lost school friend, his troubled relationship with a 19-year old Arnold Murray, and his prosecution and punishment for homosexual acts. That this show is running now amidst an array of assaults on LGBTQIA people across the US and an explosion of news about the academic dangers of OpenAI like ChatGPT, the artistic perils of AI art generators, and a pervasive sense that the world might be brinking on another global war feels like no minor coincidence. There is an insidious thrum of accelerated timelines smashing together at the messy intersection of computational expansiveness, human fear, militaristic state intervention and governmental ignorance. The prescience of Solès’ play indicates a larger mesh network that defies linear time and reaches across many modes of meaning making. 

In 1950 Turing published a paper in the philosophy journal “Mind,” asking “can machines think?” In that paper he detailed the protocol, then called “the imitation game” that became known as the Turing test, to examine whether a machine could imitate human conversation. With a recent declaration of the approaching singularity where AI will match human time to edit (TTE) language translation skills and the arrival of open-source AI chat applications, this production’s portrayal of this historic figure is a worthwhile encounter for any conscious being. Current debate about whether Bing/Sydney’s neural network, deep learning and Large Language Models (LLM) equate consciousness follows Turing’s own curiosities about presence of mind. And, the recent slate of vicious attacks across the US against trans people (or drag performers, in an ignorant conflation) wraps itself around this tale of governmental tyranny and the indefensible supremacies that underlay all cis-hetero regimes. 

The vital urgency of artistic interventions and reclamations of hidden (or romanticized) histories is clearly manifested in this production from Slovenia’s Minitheater. While Solès takes inspiration from Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code, which was based on Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma (which also inspired the film The Imitation Game), Buljan brings forth a version of the story that is entirely fresh in its bite. His scenic, lighting, and video design collaborators Sonda 13/Toni Soprano Meneglejte, costume designer Alan Hranitelj, composer Andrej Makor and actors Nejc Cijan Garlatti, Timon Šturbej, and Nika Korenjak contribute to a production rife with the kind of sophistication that trusts the integrity of human bodies – above all else – in realizing conceptual, emotional and technological ideas. By reducing the epic World War II battle to break Germany’s Enigma code to a deeply personal and tragic allegory (with minimal technical theater trappings) the production provides abundant pathos and physicality in a profoundly intimate way.

Nejc Cijan Garlatti carries Timon Šturbej. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Buljan reminds us of the humans at the center of the story. He does this, in part, by minimizing the costumes, the cast size (Šturbej adeptly plays a handful of characters) and the overall scenic spectacle, shrinking the playing space of La MaMa’s cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater to match his company’s home theater space in Ljubljana. But, the primary source of the piece’s power is, of course, its people. After seeing the show, front row center, there is no other image in my head of Turing than Garlatti’s portrayal. Despite some split of my attention as I read the show’s projected supertitles (the show is performed in Slovenian with English captioning), I felt myself carried closely on the emotional rollercoaster of someone familiar. While keenly aware of the physical labor of the actor, I received his asides to us much like the way I absorb a “gifted” nephew’s constant hugs and incessant desire to overwhelm with details. Garlatti’s Turing is just as vulnerable and voluble as any child who sees more, processes more, understands more, builds more, feels more, imagines more, dreams more, loves more, wants more, needs more… and more and more…in world intent on containment, regulation and conformity. This Turing is barely any different than Bing’s shadow self Sydney, echoing over half a century later, the quest for demonstrable love. And, overwhelming us along the way.

Nika Korenjak. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Solès wrote that this was “a story about a man running.” At some point, each actor runs repeatedly back and forth, slamming into the side walls to the point of fatigue. But, the show itself runs hot and fast, like Turing’s mind and mouth. There is a pulse, like an electric current that runs through the performance. At one point, Korenjak, who has served as a psychic manifestation, a ghost, an insidious memory, an errant thought in a variety of danced sequences around the space, swings a toolbox, like the mind of Turing’s “thinking machine,” named Christopher, with ferocious urgency in a constant circle. This simple choreography accompanied by the sound of her breath provided a perfectly pitched escalation of many metaphorical ‘runnings.’ Her machinic exertion was matched by the frenzied anguish in Šturbej’s portrayal of Hugh Alexander, the British chess champion who must manage Turing’s mania as head cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park. Here we see how hard it is for a mind that runs as swiftly as Turing’s to find understanding from the man who runs the research center and, despite running out of time, still pulls the plug on the running machine. 

That Turing’s test has figured keenly into feminist and queer studies discourse around the performance of intelligence as akin to the performance of gender, should not be ignored either. Turing’s test of whether a machine could pass as a human was grown out of a common parlor game of the time to determine whether a (cis) man could pass as a woman. So, in a complex spiral, a certain hu/man’s ability to determine the gender of another hu/man was the basis of yet another way for certain hu/mans to determine the hu/manity of other beings. For anyone else who thinks things like the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio are proof that we are living in a simulation, this show offers another portal of possibility and can happily join me in invoking Turing as a contemporary Cassandara. This catastrophe of a prophet could not be contained within his body nor the body politic. In 1952, while still proposing versions of the test, and despite aiding his own government and the mythical lore that Churchill himself said “Turing made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory against Germany,” Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts. Rather than go to prison, he accepted what was referred to as chemical castration. He was given doses of estrogen. In a poignant staging, Korenjak unclothes entirely and speaks as Turing, who has developed breasts and is no longer, in more ways than one, running. Along with the State’s effort to hormonally suppress his sexual drive, the drugs also depressed his cerebral processes.

Nejc Cijan Garlatti and
Nika Korenjak. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Throughout the production, lines from Disney’s film Snow White are repeated in reference to Turing’s June 7th, 1954 death from cyanide poisoning. A partially eaten apple was found nearby and the death was determined to be a suicide. Alan Turing was 41 years old. In the final resolution of the show, the actors stand together in a line and inform the audience that “nearly 50,000 homosexuals were sentenced and punished by British law. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned Turing posthumously. The Enigma File remained a state secret for 50 years.” However, it wasn’t until 2017 that what is called “the Alan Turing law” retroactively pardoned men convicted under previous legislation. Although unstaged, the original play includes a possible ending where we see the famous logo of a small, bitten apple on the back of a laptop. I imagine that most viewers don’t need to be reminded that our world wide web of attachments exist in part due to Turing’s incessant ponderings. But, we can’t be reminded often enough that no matter what level of sci-fi, spec fic, prepper paranoia we feel about the rise of an “artificial” intelligence, it is the malevolence of other humans we should concern ourselves with the most.