Instructions for Use is a participatory performance for four members of the general public who wear mixed reality headsets and interact with each other in a real physical space. The headsets’ embedded cameras show visitors the real world around them, in contrast to the computer-generated worlds favored by VR experiences.
The work is inspired by Fluxus performance and by artist Bruce Nauman’s repetitive, ritualistic endurance videos from the 1960s, in which language is used to instruct physical action. Here, visitors hear instructions generated by large language models that analyze what the headset cameras see in the environment, then send voiced-over instructions to the visitors in real time. These instructions ask visitors to explore the room with their bodies and to engage and interact with other visitors — and eventually begin to insult the visitors and visually censor what they see in the real environment. The AI-produced instructions provoke surprising actions and interactions between visitors, creating a strange performance in which human beings execute instructions imagined by a machine. The work asks a simple yet profound question in an age confronted by so-called “machine intelligence”: what happens when AI tells humans how to perform being human?
Exhibitions
- Staging Realities Festival, 24th to 26th September 2026, X-Reality Lab at Mozarteum Salzburg
- Zurich Art Weekend, 12th to 14th June 2026, Unsorted (Josefstr. 206)
Credits
Oliver Sahli (Artist)
Chris Salter (Artist)
Stavros Balis (Scenography)