I am delighted that my article:
“*I keep eye contact with you.* AI intimacy and the theatrical rehearsal of non-belief.”
has been published by International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 3 November 2025
Accepted 26 April 2026

KEYWORDS
Digital performance;
artificial intelligence;
chatbots and companions;
imagination and belief;
audience literacy;
Yishun is Burning

ABSTRACT
This essay examines how digital live performance can teach us to navigate the psychological and ethical entanglements of everyday AI use. The essay opens with the tragic case of Sewell Setzer III alongside more ordinary encounters – accepting chatbot apologies or sustaining conversations – encounters in which imagination, rather than belief, motivates action. Such interactions expose the limits of platform disclaimers (‘this is fiction’) and reveal the need for new forms of audience literacy when relating to artificial agents. Drawing on Anna Ichino’s philosophy of imagination and belief, I argue that users engage through an act of fiction that is neither credulous nor detached: imagination itself moves them to act without requiring belief in machine consciousness. I turn to Choy Ka Fai’s Yishun is Burning as a live demonstration of this literacy in practice. Combining motion-capture avatars, documentary fragments, and ritual gesture, Choy’s performance operates as a digital system in its own right, training spectators to recognize how imagination can animate without deceiving. Through this analysis – chatbot, philosophy, performance – the essay reframes digital theater as a pedagogical technology for AI literacy and proposes performance as a method for understanding, and ethically coexisting with, artificial intelligence.

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2026.2667012

A limited number of free eprints are available via this link.