TEL AVIV.- A new solo exhibition by Amir Yatziv (b. 1972, lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo) centers on Peter, a literary character drawn from Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story A Report to an Academy. Kafka’s Peter is an ape captured by a hunting expedition and brought to Europe, where he learns to imitate human behavior and performs on stages as an entertainer. Yatziv places Peter at the heart of a new video installation based on live simulation which updates, responds, and changes in real time.

Over the past two years, Yatziv has reanimated the character of Peter using AI technologies and staged a series of duet performances with him. Taking interpretive liberties with Kafka’s original text, Yatziv imagines a Peter who no longer seeks only to integrate into human society but instead expresses a strong desire to return to being an ape—a state he has no longer remembers. In these performances, the two converse about life—Peter’s desires, his habits and his experiences—and through their interaction an elusive dynamic of power and control emerges. This dynamic also relates to the degree of freedom granted to Peter, or what language models such as GPT refer to as "temperature." This parameter ranges from strict adherence to a written script to entirely unpredictable responses—what we may understand as free improvisation.

The idea of transforming the performance with Peter into an exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo led to a significant development in Yatziv’s work which had to do with the discovery in Kafka’s estate of two previously unpublished fragments from the story. Yatziv chose to use these fragments as a structural premise for the exhibition. In them, Peter is described in the time between performances—confined to his room, next to his agent’s room, attempting to pass the hours while yearning for human contact.

Inspired by these fragments, Yatziv decided to situate Peter in the Center’s ground-floor gallery as someone residing in a closed room. Here, Peter is present throughout the exhibition’s opening hours, and spends his time between performances, which take place on selected evenings in the gallery. During his stay in the room, Peter prepares for his appearances—rehearsing songs and dialogue excerpts from the show—and gathers information about his prospective audience. He also performs mundane, everyday activities. In this, he can be seen to echo early works in performance and video art, in which artists confined themselves to enclosed spaces and documented repetitive actions over extended periods—works Peter has “learned” as part of his preparation. Yet whereas those early works involved physical endurance, here we encounter what the artist calls "sisyphean computing": no longer a body exerting itself, but a computational system that consumes and expends energy incessantly.

Visitors are invited to observe Peter and even call him on the phone to engage in conversation. He, in turn, asks them questions and adapts his responses. When not interacting with his audience, Peter can be seen resting, pacing, playing the piano or watching nature documentaries on television. At other moments, he withdraws into his inner world—reciting texts in front of a mirror or animating two puppet heads that serve as his imaginary companions.

As part of his activity in the gallery, Peter is programmed to collect information from visitors about their everyday behaviors, inspired by the sociological research project Mass-Observation. Initiated in the UK in 1937 and continuing to this day, Mass-Observation seeks to gather long-term data on the habits and thoughts of ordinary people as they evolve over time. As an an analog, physical archive built on subjective impressions, it may be seen as an antithesis to the digital databases that feed Peter as a deep-learning AI system. Much like the Mass-Observation questionnaires, Peter studies his audience, gathering human observations about the aspects of life that remain opaque to him.

The encounter with Peter invites renewed reflection on our relationships with others—human to human, human to animal, human to machine—within the framework of technologies that are rewiring our world. Ultimately, it raises the question: who, in fact, is reporting to whom?

“Amir Yatziv: A Report” is curated by Tamar Margalit.