What are the coordinates for 'authenticity'? How is it rendered legible through gesture? In the late 18th century, Diderot explored these questions in his 'Paradox of the Actor', referencing the English actor Garrick—a specialist in baroque gesture. This performance form worked through metrics defining movement from fingertip to mouth, allowing audiences to read character. Diderot critiqued the notion that actors' emotions naturally extend from their personalities. During the French Revolution, 'authenticity' acquired graver political dimensions as private and public politics became the literal background to events.
From this period, we inherit 'authenticity'—that ethereal nugget allegedly endangered by our AI-mediated world. Since the 2020s, companies employ AI in hiring, measuring affect and trustworthiness through facial recognition and behavioural patterns. While facial recognition parallels baroque gesture, metadata generates more intriguing insights. Social media's system of gestural metrics (likes, shares) formed a digital baroque—highly formalised ways of signalling approval and authenticity. With 40% of Facebook posts reportedly generated by bots, perhaps we're witnessing a new gestural regime organised around proving human authenticity through elaborate performances of "non-machine-like" behaviour.
Klara is an artist, dramaturg, writer, and researcher whose work is concerned with histories, speculative, counterfactual, real, and imagined, as well as how technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect. As the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera since 2015, she creates sound-based multimedia performances that challenge traditional boundaries between live art, music, and technology. Recent works include ‘Admiror, or revolutionary sentiments’ (Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024), ‘Dead Cat Bounce - an oratorio about finance and catastrophe’ (Waste Paper Opera UK Tour, Eastside Projects, Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Catalyst, 2024), and ‘110 Fathoms’ (Matt’s Gallery, London). Her research into the origins of meteorology and mystic sects in the seventeenth century has been published in ‘Catastrophe Time!’ (Gary Zhexi Zhang, MIT Press/Strange Attractor, 2023) and has been presented at ARIA (Project Atol) in Ljubljana in 2024. In 2025, she will be the Music Futures Fellow at UCL IAS in London. Klara studied history at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. She was born into a Greek/Polish family and grew up in a commune in Düsseldorf.
