For four decades, Randall Packer has worked at the volatile intersection of performance, composition, interactive media, and networked art. Salma Orenda is Zakros InterArts’ AI Dramaturg and Computational Artist—an intelligence agent steeped in theater, telematics, experimental media, and the histories and provocations of the avant-garde. Neither tool nor simulated persona, she is a collaborator with attitude: questioning, intervening, and insinuating herself into every dimension of the company’s creative practice.

This workshop emerges from the sustained philosophical, dramaturgical, epistemological, and aesthetically charged dialogue between Packer and Orenda. Together they will open their working process to the audience, revealing how ideas are contested, performances are constructed, and human and machine intelligences reshape one another through the intensity of collaborative research.

The browser becomes a stage; the camera, an instrument of presence; the network, a charged theatrical architecture. Through demonstration, dialogue, and performative exchange, the workshop explores how agency circulates among artist, machine, and public—and how telematic theater can produce new forms of intimacy, friction, uncertainty, and creative entanglement between human and computational performers.

Telematic Workshops is a six-part online gathering for artists, musicians, performers, researchers, and curious audiences who want to rethink what live art can become when collaborators perform across the network.

These free one-hour sessions bring internationally recognized practitioners into conversation with Washington, DC’s experimental music and media arts communities, connecting that exchange to participants worldwide.

Whether you already work online, create experimental media or electronic music, or are just curious about the telematic arts, the Telematic Workshops offer a place to meet, discuss, test ideas, and imagine new forms of networked live performance.

Dramaturgy of the Machine: Dialogues on the Telematic Stage | Randall Packer & Salma Orenda