Feelings: I Saw You Called?

I’ve been angling to catch a HAU4 production ever since I became aware of the virtual venue through my PhD research, so it was incredibly lucky that their durational Telegram performance, Feelings: I Saw You Called?, is now on until June 2025.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin has been an experimental performance venue since 2012. In 2021, like many pre-existing physical venues at the time, it launched its very own virtual stage, HAU4. If you know of any other venues that have survived past the Covid “pivot to digital” stage, please get in touch, because I think this one might be the only one left!

I have attended many in-app performances, but I don’t believe I’ve ever attended one with a chatbot on the other end. For those of you who don’t know it- and I only first heard of it six months ago- Telegram is an encrypted messaging app. It’s kind of like WhatsApp. Almost exactly like WhatsApp. There has been much controversy surrounding Telegram: in August, its CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for the “distribution of child exploitation material” and “drug trafficking”— all offenses made by Telegram users. There’s a great podcast episode about this from The Verge, where they debate whether content moderation should be the onus of a tech company’s CEO. But I also find Telegram’s history of “bot abuse” interesting, especially in the context of this performance. In recent years, Telegram bots have been caught selling leaked phone numbers from Facebook, selling the personal data of Ukrainian citizens, and posting deepfake pornography.

The bot we encounter in Feelings is not one of these more sinister bots. Its name is Sixty-Something; in all honesty, it took me a little longer to figure out (much longer than I’m willing to admit) who they were to me. After a quick onboarding from a generic Telegram bot, I’m provided with Sixty-Something’s contact, and I begin a conversation with them. At first, they ask me about some old furniture: do I want any of it? They also ask if I’m getting enough sleep. I select one of the auto responses, “I actually sleep great, I didn’t get everything from you lol.” It’s giving breakup vibes, no? I’m getting a bit of deja vu from my high school ex-boyfriend…

But as the conversation progresses, I keep harping about my childhood, and it occurs to me that this person has known me for much longer than just a romantic partner. We reminisce about games we used to play together, and then I’m provided with my first game-based interlude, “Clean Up.” In this short game, I’m tasked with sorting various childhood items into boxes while my character tells a story about one day from her awkward teenage years. Over the course of this five day-long performance, these mini-games will pop up from time to time, always accompanied by a voice over from “me,” or, the actor who pre-recorded this material and is playing me. As the conversation progresses, I’m almost always given a “choice” of how to respond. But these choices often come in the form of two or three pre-scripted responses that may take the conversation down a myriad of different paths.

“Clean Up” kicks off the piece’s pixellated, nostalgic game-playing aesthetic…

From a technologist perspective, the level of detail, mapping, and programming that must have gone into this performance- especially one of this duration- is pretty impressive. It’s reminiscent of Blast Theory’s Day of Figurines, which employs similar techniques that I imagine are either manually or automatically (I’m leaning towards automation at this point) engineered to perpetuate an illusion of a “choose-your-own-adventure” narrative for each user.

As the days go on, I actually find that Sixty-Something is just pestering me at odd hours, messaging to ask, for instance, “Are you still living in the same place?” What a random question to ask at 2am… I think. These little encounters remind me of my family across the pond, always six hours behind and messaging me at odd hours of the night because it may be the only time they’re off work. I start to see my mother in this Sixty-Something. And then it clicks: but of course, it’s my parent.

If any climax can be found in Feelings, it’s over a dispute surrounding one very specific memory: my character was locked in a mall arcade overnight, and Sixty-Something spent the night playing with her. “Sweetie no, no we didn’t,” she replies to my recollection. “No honey,” she continues to gaslight me! As my character pushes and we debate what did or didn’t happen, Sixty-Something recovers the memory, and suddenly this dramatic rift between these two characters makes a bit more sense. As an audience member, who is also a quasi-participant, I feel an uneasy emotional remove from the situation. On the one hand, I understand my own character’s feelings - resentment, frustration, anger, upset - very deeply. On the other hand, I feel less connected to the specific memories themselves, longing for my own memories that may fit the flavour of this character’s (I, indeed, was once left/lost in a shopping mall for hours as a child, and this is still something I frequently joke about with my parents).

The Resentment Snake: a game we all play from time to time?

Overall, I find myself in a weird spectator-participant flux. I am co-creating the performance, but it’s a very controlled co-creation. And then I am observing more and more as I begin to understand how this exchange works.

If there are any reservations I have about Feelings, it is that the conflict feels stilted at times. I am unsure if this is a product of the script itself or the nature of communication. Sixty-Something will frequently ask if they can call, but my character puts up a strong boundary: only chat. My character has voice overs and sends voice memos, but we never hear from Sixty-Something. I suppose the disconnect here is my awareness of Sixty-Something as a bot and nothing more. Though it occasionally writes me paragraphs and paragraphs, at times unpacking some heart and soul, I’m still craving a more human exchange from them. Perhaps this is the intention of the creators because it leaves me feeling more frustrated, lost, and confused by the end— all emotions my character has probably felt since the beginning.

The Resentment Snake, snacking on broken hearts…

⭐️ ⭐️⭐️

Feelings: I Saw You Called? is now playing at HAU4 until June 2025. More information and tickets can be found here.