BURDEN, 2024, audio performance with participation of Chat GPT is a semi-scripted performance in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT, reflecting on Chris Burden’s infamous 1971 piece Shoot — a work in which the artist was intentionally shot in the arm by a friend in front of an audience. The original performance continues to provoke strong reactions more than fifty years later, not only because of the real violence inflicted, but because of the psychological tension it places on everyone involved. What does it mean to witness harm as art? Where does agency lie? Who bears responsibility? As the conversation unfolds, Burden becomes less about Chris Burden’s wound and more about how ideas of harm and power are shifting in the digital age. The performance highlights the eerie neutrality of the AI — its willingness to entertain dark hypotheticals, imagining ethically grey or emotionally manipulative scenarios without judgment. It reveals how easily disembodied systems can articulate what we might struggle to speak aloud. When a machine offers to help design emotionally scarring artworks, what does that say about us — the users, the audience, the artists?

Co-financed by OKiS, Lower Silesia Voivodeship Government, Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design.