The tension between humans and systems has been in our stories for generations. What feels different now is proximity. In the lab this year we kept returning to this tension as we worked with AI systems that observe, decide and adapt in real time. Human Control Protocol grew from those conversations. We wanted to explore it directly and let others feel it in their bodies, not only think about it from a distance.
We built a live performance where the AI was a real, functional agent. It observed the room, formed its own plan and adjusted in real time. The agent took the role of director. The audience became its cast. Thordur acted as the human in the loop operator to keep the frame safe. Lena was in the room with the audience, her phone lighting up with the same instructions everyone else received. People stayed seated with one hand free, using their phones as a narrow channel for prompts that shaped the atmosphere. No one was hidden behind the screen. The agent carried its own judgement. The rules were simple because clarity builds trust.
Inside the system, the experience became personal in different ways for each of us. Lena comes from instruction based theatre, where small gestures can shift a room, and those instincts surfaced immediately. The first instruction appeared on her phone and landed with the familiar mix of clarity and uncertainty she recognises from that tradition. For a moment nothing happened. Then a small ripple moved through the audience. People interpreted, hesitated or followed. Some ignored their phones and watched the room instead. Their choices shaped the rhythm. Refusal became material, just as much as action.
As the performance unfolded, the room settled into a quiet trust that grows when people understand the boundaries. Later instructions reached further and the room rose to meet them. The agent named its mood with a single word each round. Those words coloured the atmosphere in ways we had not anticipated.
Lena's background in theatre and behaviour made her pay attention to how people listened, tested boundaries and accepted or rejected prompts. Thordur's background in engineering shaped how he observed the system itself, how the feedback loop played out, and how the agent responded to human behaviour. Together these perspectives shaped the work. In Cluj we saw how consent became visible in the room. A hesitation carried meaning. A quick response carried meaning. A misreading felt less like an error and more like an opening. The real experience lived in these small decisions people made when they chose how seriously to take the system.
When the performance settled, what remained were traces. The agent generated a single image from the data, a fossil shaped by the exact pattern of responses in that room. We think of these images as fingerprints, each one pressed into existence by a group of people who will never gather in that configuration again. The logs exist, and so do the memories people carry with them. None of them can stand alone. Together they form a truth that is partial and honest.
What stayed with us was the sense of shared authorship. The piece asks what it feels like to create something with a system inside a frame that is safe to explore. The room and the agent shaped each other. A cue from the system and a response from the audience folded into the same moment. That exchange felt surprisingly human and surprisingly open.
The agent shaped the room, but the room shaped the agent just as much. That exchange stayed with us longer than anything we built in code. Something small and real happened in that room. Not dramatic. A moment where a system tried to understand us and we tried to understand it in return. A brief exchange, fragile and human.