The Pen Test

The Pen Test (2025) is a performance piece, web framework that conceptually conflates Turing’s famous test and cybersecurity penetration tests into an EDM prompt-a-thon. We see this framework as a multimedia synthesizer able to bond together large audiences to have fun, critically reflect, and create empowering, performance-specific AI manifestos (AI written, co-created or manually overridden). 

For this part experiment, part performance, part collaborative poem, we combine interactive technology, large language models, and mobile devices to test the hold words and algorithms have on us as humans. 

Duration is 12 minutes and consists of the stages of info-gathering, reconnaissance, vulnerability, exploitation, and seize/recovery (the poem). First users chat with AI; from the responses, they get assigned teams to comply with activity prompts and data uploading [that doesn’t violate GDPR]. A whorling theater visualization helps order the indeterminacy as users eventually get eliminated once AI-generated prompts intensify, eliciting our most human responses. 

Every performance produces publishable/archivable output, site-specific artifacts. For Ars Electronica, we propose to push this framework to include images and video, creatively crowdsourcing and collaborating with AI to produce a site-specific literary and visual vernacular of media from the audience.

Credits

Music, Programming, Performance, and Concept - Jesse Allison (USA), allisonic.com

Poetry, Performance, and Concept - Vincent A. Cellucci (Netherlands)

Visuals, Programming, Performance and Concept - Derick Ostrenko (USA), frederickostrenko.com

Support Received From

Louisiana State University 

TU Delft Library