Immunitat Jordi Casanovas

Six people who had never met before are invited to participate in a demographic survey whose aim is to get a better management of future crises. They are in the same room and are not allowed to maintain any contact with the outside world. They have been given a number and a little box with two push buttons; one is green and the other one, red. An artificial intelligence will ask questions related to the political management of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then they will have to vote. The purpose is to let them show everything they believe they think, but also those thoughts they still don’t know they have. The rage and frustration stockpiled during so many months characterized by restrictions, tragedies and general exhaustion will soon come out to put the simple democratic system proposed by the computer to the test, which lies in the simple action of voting yes or no.

As the author and director of this theatre staging states, a black-box algorithm is the one that does not allow its user to see its internal functioning. All we know from the black box are the stimuli and the data introduced in it as well as the results coming from it. We don’t know what the algorithm has done internally to transform the initial data into the final results. As it usually happens with those algorithms present in Google, Instagram or Netflix, it is often almost impossible to know what they think about us so that they can propose us what we are eventually proposed.

The question is that an algorithm is not the only thing that can become a black box; brains and minds often work similarly to it and we cannot really get to know what is happening inside them and why they respond in a specific way to a specific situation. Likewise, public institutions and their internal processes are also an example of a black box.

This show is a coproduction of Barcelona’s 2022 Grec Festival and the La Villarroel company.