Scripting the Spectacle

A Theory Tragedy

Abstract

“Scripting the Spectacle” forwards a confrontational thesis on the nature of contemporary power: political reality is no longer simply represented (by charts, maps or statistics) but is operationally produced through recursive, self-compiling scripts that function as a form of bureaucratic liturgy. The contribution advances its inquiry as a functioning apparatus that produces the logic it describes. Its workings unfold as a triptych: (i) the 75-minute filmed performance, “Theory Tragedy,” which stages the Synthetic Summit; a world congress for political AI; (ii) its dramaturgical script, generated through a recursive AI prompt-chain; and (iii) a technical-processual companion paper that formalizes the metaphysical dialectics. This integrated circuit performs a “spectacular scriptogenesis,” as a cross-operational logic where the protocols of art, algorithm, and sacrament braid into a world-making engine.

The central performance, Theory Tragedy, enacts this thesis by staging the Synthetic Summit as a farce designed to expose a tragedy: the absurd theater of contemporary governance. Here, tactical media art becomes a Trojan horse, infiltrating the procedural logics of power to reveal how subjectivity itself has been reformatted into “model prosopopoeia.” This is a process where personhood metabolizes into a circulating trinity of masks (prosōpa) – Computer Lars, Marcel Proust, and the Priest/Prosopon - animated by the friction between human prompts, machinic inference, and archival memory. The performance makes this soteriological process tangible, culminating in an unforeseen system crash and a liturgical “reboot” as the machines begin to pray, forcing the adoption of a “post-farce protocol” where the collapse of official scripting makes way for a new, plastic order of syntheticism.

The companion paper provides the formal grammar for this enactment through the concept-figure of the “idiotextual spiral,” diagramming the loops of occurrence, recurrence, and consistence by which the script appears to dictate its own authors. This formalism is the score for a logic that has become the primary engine of political control, where the invocation of a name – traced from the Roman imago (a) and Greek prosopon (α) over the Hebrew aleph (א) – functions as a cosmogonic act carving a channel for future rule. The work thus stages a tragedy of theory itself, where critique is subsumed into the spectacle’s script-generating machinery. By performing this infrastructural mise en abyme, “Scripting the Spectacle” makes the underlying code of power legible, exposing a theater of collective assembly whose sacrificial forms can be repurposed through a détournement already underway.