APHASIA runs for thirty minutes in a space configured as a surveillance environment. A wide PTZ camera surveys the whole room. A second camera turns from person to person for the loaded read: age, gender, race, emotion. The categories escalate from the apparently neutral to the politically weighted, drawn from regimes in use at borders, in policing and in hiring.

The piece runs in three states. First the machine reads the audience. Then it fails, into its own documented failure modes, with labels flipping and contradicting across a single face and the apparatus sorting a space where nobody stands. Haze floods the room and the cameras go blind. In the last state the spatial audio collapses across all channels into one sustained tonal mass, the inverse of total recognition, and then stops. The audience exits into a world where the apparatus keeps running.

A first prototype was presented on 16 July 2026 in Lab 1 of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, as my master’s thesis project. The work is in development.