How Is AI Transforming Theater?

At the beginning of the 20th century, people expected the industrial revolution to have an amazing and explosive impact. A wave of wild enthusiasm for the “machine” as a producer of speed and generator of energy spread rapidly, as evidenced by the Futurist Manifesto (1909), for example, which made the human body – only partially able-bodied – a metaphor for the automobile. The new man as idealized at the beginning of the century was the result of a surgical graft capable of living in a body that was metallic and no longer animal, and of a dynamism that updated the concepts of time and space. In this sense, Futurism seems to embody Paul Virilio’s definition of dromology as a science dealing with the “logic of speed” (Vitesse et politique, 1977).

These revolutionary expectations of a domesticated body as the driver of a collective action (as in the case of the war that would soon rage through Europe) were counterbalanced by the dystopian insights concerning the dangers of a technical ideology, especially on the part of artists. Consider, for example, Carl Gustav Jung’s analysis of dreams or Edward Morgan Forster’s eloquent short story, The Machine Stops (1909). Foster’s imaginary world is reduced to ash and uninhabitable: the few survivors live in isolation, confined to underground cells within a dominating Machine. It was necessary to pass through the Machine (through Instagram?) in order to maintain any contact with the outside world, which was only accessed through holograms and messages. Although there were thousands of contacts, it was impossible to establish meaningful relationships because of the frenzy with which the inhabitants worshipped and interacted with the Machine itself. Its hum was the only spirit of the times tolerated.

More than a hundred years after these prophetic flashes, it seems more necessary than ever to interact with - some would say “to regulate” – the Machine; in short, to come to terms with Generative Artificial Intelligence. In fact, the question of the best possible coexistence with this tool has become a virtual obsession, giving voice to the fear of working men and women around the world who wonder what will become of their professions when the Machine no longer needs their input.

Does art harbor this same fear? Well, at the heart of AI are convolutional neural networks, closely modeled on the functioning of the human brain. Thus, for example, the image processing DeepDream program was developed; that is, as a sort of hallucination (note that this is a technical term that formally indicates the output produced by Artificial Information and in objective contradiction with the data provided as input). In short, starting from a detail, the program sees what is not there; one could say it imagines something.

However, its creative process is standardized because it is based on a sentence completion system. To give a rather simplistic example: I want to eat A) an apple, B) a table, C) my cat. In this way, the so-called art of AI takes the real as an artifice; it blurs it. Without changing the gaze, it uses a sort of “lateral peripheral vision,” to adopt a phrase typical of the theater. However, regardless of the debate on the nature of inspiration, for now generative AI cannot replace the uniqueness of a live show, the vital element of living bodies.

Brilliant examples of artistic experimentation with AI were seen in the last FOG season. In fact, theater in Virtual Reality has already been tried for some years now and in contexts such as the Venice Biennale. Specifically, AI was used to build immersive environments like those proposed by the Wayne McGregor Company for UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey. Echoing the Futurist Manifesto mentioned above, the dancers created an eco-mythological dystopia in which the effects of climate change have revealed themselves fully. In choreographies bearing McGregor’s surrealist imprint, the dancers impersonate survivors of a future that is already present in a room filled with deafening noise, in a sulfurous, suffocating area, in the total immersion of all those present in the room that is the world-to-come. In an osmosis between digital and real, this blackest of Odysseys presents itself as a multimedia, sensory journey necessary to awaken man’s imaginative capacity. With film design by Ravi Deepres and score by Joel Cadbury, McGregor ferociously unveils a potential collective goal.

The tools of generative AI can enhance the cross-media elements of the performances, encouraging artists to experiment with generating images capable of faithfully reproducing their own concept, for example, as Kamilia Kard does with her artificial erotic gardens, or of overturning the existential approach of the performance. In the case of Agrupación Señor Serrano, the show Una Isla addresses the “philosophy of the machine”. The author and performer puts into practice the underlying question on which the reticence toward generative AI is based: How can human beings coexist with the temptation to rely on a machine built in their own image and likeness?

Serrano’s show shakes the existential foundations of the contemporary by leaving a space of unpredictability for machine learning, ensuring that even the performance develops in unexpected ways.  Meanwhile, in Serrano’s artificial writing, the theme of the individual of the future, the lone survivor, the Robinson Crusoe of time-to-come reappears. Crushed by the age-old exercise of free will, and incapable of sustaining the commitment of relations with other equally exhausted human beings, we all reflect and see ourselves on the island, entrusted to a non-Christian, non-pagan “god”, neither Providence nor Chaos, but AI.

And finally a third way to develop the theme of AI artistically and conceptually is to make it manifest and visible, not only on the level of sound as with Serrano but in its very first visualization in the collective imagination. Once again, Marcos Morau proves himself a master in the creation of uchronic atmospheres in which present, absolute future and vintage scenarios mingle, triggering an almost nauseating disorientation. While allowing ourselves to be lulled into a pseudo-analogical melancholy, we expose ourselves to the dagger of Firmamento, which seizes our consciousness and hurls it into the inconceivable, into the immensity of the universe, crushing the observer though it is apparently conceivable for AI. Morau reveals the entity, creating with La Veronal a group of six human marionettes handcrafted with cables and face shields, whose effects he investigates without bias. Among the flashes of memories of childhood games and loves, the standard sneaks in, the repeated gesture that is crushed like awareness, the robot that remembers to look towards heaven.