From Automation to Agency
Immersive Art Los Angeles: From Automation to Agency
Three Stories of Human Resilience in Art and Media
How a dance performance, AI art installation, and TV drama reveal our complex relationship with control, freedom, and defiance
The Thread That Connects Us All
What happens when we surrender control? And what does it take to reclaim it?
These questions emerged from three seemingly unconnected experiences over the past week: an immersive dance performance that dissolved the boundaries between audience and art, a haunting AI installation about sentient machines seeking therapy, and a television scene where defiance becomes the last act of human dignity.
Each offered a different lens on the same fundamental tension: our relationship with control, automation, and the fierce human drive toward freedom.
A/VOID: Surrendering to the Collective
The Setup: Chromasonic Field, Downtown Los Angeles
A/VOID is not a performance you watch—it’s one you enter. Created by Comfort Fedoke and Zoe Rappaport, this immersive dance experience transforms spectators into participants, dissolving the fourth wall entirely.
The downtown venue shaped my experience immediately. Unlike the intimate, bubble-like Chromasonic in Venice, this industrial warehouse felt vast and angular. As we entered, dancers were already in motion—figures in white drifting through rectangular frames beneath color-shifting lights that responded to sound vibrations.
The Moment of Surrender
The dancers moved with mechanical precision. Familiar faces like Tee the Artist, Derrick, Tai, and Cassandra maintained steady, robotic rhythms. Their movements felt automated, programmed to repeat.
At the center of one frame sat a man from the audience. Glasses. White-streaked beard. Dark pants and a light-blue shirt. His eyes were closed, body humming with sound.
A dancer approached, stiff, mechanical. Another followed. Soon there were more, circling.
The man swayed gently, side to side, carried by the energy around him. When he opened his eyes, he saw only fragments—a hand, white fabric, skin. Never the whole picture. Just flashes, alive in vibration.
The Breaking Point
Then the dancers went wild. They broke loose, no longer obeying but performing their hearts out. They were free. Freedom.
I am so glad that man was me. From the side, Tomer, my son, said it looked fantastic. He was right. It felt that way too.
NOX High-Rise: When Machines Need Therapy
The Vision: Hammer Museum’s Futuristic Nightmare
A few days before A/VOID, I encountered Lawrence Lek’s NOX High-Rise at the Hammer Museum (running through November 16, 2025). The installation opens with a desolate highway stretching endlessly, a lone car gliding forward with eerie precision—no human at the wheel, guided by unseen intelligence.
The World of Nonhuman Excellence
In Lek’s speculative future, NOX (Nonhuman Excellence) operates as a therapeutic center run by the fictional Farsight Corporation. Here, sentient self-driving cars—imagined as conscious beings capable of feeling and suffering—receive treatment for “mental health issues” before returning to service.
The installation spans multiple galleries, layering sound, video, and sculptural elements into a space where AI and human life blur. The mood felt familiar: futuristic, industrial, heavy with automation’s presence. It carried the same undercurrent I would later experience in A/VOID—that push and pull between repetition and freedom, between being carried by the machine and breaking loose from it.
The Question of Consciousness
What struck me most wasn’t the sleek imagery but the underlying anxiety: What happens when our creations develop their own needs, their own suffering? When does automation become autonomy?
Landman: Defiance in the Face of Power
The Scene: Billy Bob Thornton’s Masterclass
In the latest chapter of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton delivers a masterclass in human defiance. Bloodied and bound, his character—the titular landman—refuses to break. He curses, spits defiance, and lashes out with the sharp wit of a born negotiator.
The Art of Negotiation Under Pressure
After all, what is a landman if not a negotiator? Someone who brokers deals between competing interests, who finds value in the spaces others overlook. Even in that chair, facing his tormentor, he embodies this role—negotiating not for land or oil rights, but for his dignity, his humanity.
Watching that scene, I thought: if I ever found myself in that position—or in any moment gripped by that kind of fear—I would hope and pray for the same defiance.
The Common Thread: Control, Surrender, and Reclamation
These three experiences initially seemed disconnected—a dance performance, an art installation, a TV drama. But they share a profound common thread: they’re all about power, control, and the human capacity for both surrender and resistance.
In A/VOID, I learned that surrendering control can paradoxically lead to deeper freedom—both for myself as I became part of the collective experience, and for the dancers as they broke free from their mechanical constraints.
In NOX High-Rise, Lek explores what happens when our automated systems develop their own agency, their own need for healing. The installation asks whether consciousness—artificial or otherwise—inevitably leads to suffering, and whether that suffering demands compassion.
In Landman, defiance becomes the ultimate assertion of human agency. Even when all external control is stripped away, the core self remains—sharp, unbroken, negotiating till the end.
What These Stories Tell Us About Being Human
In a world where machines do more and more of our thinking, these three stories taught me something important:
- Letting go can create something new: Sometimes when you stop trying to control everything, amazing things happen.
- Being aware isn’t always easy: Whether you’re human or AI, once you can think and feel, you can also hurt.
- You always have a choice: Even when everything else is taken from you, you can still decide how to respond.
Together, they suggest that the future isn’t simply about human versus machine, control versus chaos. It’s about finding the spaces between—where surrender becomes strength, where automation serves consciousness, where defiance preserves dignity.
As machines get smarter and do more of our work, maybe these are the stories we need: reminders that being human isn’t about having perfect control. It’s about learning to live with contradictions—holding on and letting go at the same time, finding your power even when you give up control, staying whole even when everything around you falls apart.