On Saturday 16 March, members of the public were invited to participate in the mixed-reality production of ‘Faust Shop 2.0’ at Cambridge Central Library in a performance directed and produced by CDH Associates Dr Annja Neumann and Alex Mentzel for the Cambridge Festival. Participants were introduced to Homunculus – a digital, multi-dimensional artificial life created by Collective AI – as they were asked to consider the Faustian pacts we make in our daily digital lives with tech.

The Faust Shop performance is a performance as research (PaR) project led by Dr Annja Neumann and Alex Mentzel. It is part of Neumann’s ‘Re-staging public spaces’ project funded by Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Isaac Newton Trust and of Mentzel’s PhD project on ‘digital topographies’ funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Link: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/restaging-public-spaces/#1-faust-shop-2-0