Autodrama Stages a Chamber Play for Self-Directing Actors
Gary Zhexi Zhang, Amant's New York fall resident, gives a performance lecture on a game engine stage where characters, lights and cameras run themselves.
- When
- Thu., Oct. 29, 2026, 7 to 9 p.m. Doors open at 6:45 p.m.
- Where
- Géza, on Amant's campus in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
- Admission
- Free. RSVP encouraged but not required; entry is first come, first served.
Autodrama is a performance lecture by Gary Zhexi Zhang about a game engine stage that directs itself. Nobody plays it. Characters act independently of any player, and the lighting and cameras behave as performers too, working through "situations" Zhang has rehearsed out of the language of cinema, vertical micro-dramas and group psychology. Amant calls the result a "virtual chamber play." In the footage released for the evening, an oversized, babylike figure stands alone under a spotlight, then fills the frame in close-up, its eyes sliding from side to side as Zhang narrates.
Autodrama, trailer with narration by Gary Zhexi Zhang. Courtesy Amant.
In that narration, Zhang describes Autodrama as a "self-directing melodrama performance" built from "a cast of non-player characters," which the artist spells out as "automated digital agents," counting "both performing bodies and cameras and lighting systems" among them. The genre is a deliberate choice. Melodrama, Zhang notes, "arrived at a moment of industrial and technological upheaval," and the project uses it to think through "animacy, puppetry, but also the choreography and architecture of emotional and social coordination."
Zhang is an artist and writer and a contributor to Frieze, and Zhang's work has long dealt with the fictions running inside technical systems: an earlier solo show took catastrophe insurance as its subject, and the artist has researched the role of non-human agents in finance. Amant frames Autodrama as an extension of the artist's "longstanding interest in parasociality, egregores, and the cybernetics of identity," played out through scenes of "heightened and calculated sentimentality."
The lecture is part of For Your Reference, the series in which Amant's artists in residence present the references behind their ongoing research. Zhang is the institution's New York resident for fall 2026, and this is the third For Your Reference event of the season.
Stills from the Autodrama trailer. Courtesy Amant and Gary Zhexi Zhang.
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