A digital musical theatre piece about the transience of artificial intelligence with a libretto by the AI text generator GPT-3. Artificial intelligence as a creator of art has been on everyone’s lips again, most recently with the robot artist Ai-Da, artists have been experimenting with computer technology since its beginnings. Now the interdisciplinary ensemble gamut inc (Maciej Sledziecki and Marion Wörle) goes one step further and asks: “What actually happens to all the artificial intelligences when progress has overtaken them?” They put this into practice in their new music theatre performance ‘Over the Edge Club (revisited)’ by incorporating the “currently most powerful tool for artificial intelligence” (SPIEGEL), the GPT-3 speech generator, and write a libretto about it.
The outdated AIs appear in the form of a human performer avatar. Dancer and choreographer Ruben Reniers represents this super intelligence from the distant future, who dreams about its predecessors, the rejected high-tech machines and artificial intelligences stored somewhere in its genetic code. For example, there is Eugene Goostman, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy, actually a software that for the first time ever passed a Turing test. Now he errs through the dream with a dissociative identity disorder – whether he is human or software. Also the famous chatbots ELIZA and KUKI appear and start a poetic non-sense conversation that culminates in mantra-like chants.
The overall composition follows the sleep rhythm of the avatar. Thus, the electronic music, which is partly formed by algorithmic processes, is based on typical brain frequencies of the different sleep phases. Together with the dancer and choreographer Ruben Reniers, gamut inc create an atmospherically dense work, an ironic resonance space for the dreams and visions of the present.
Over the Edge Club (revisited) | A digital musical theatre by gamut inc
Sunday, 20th December | Doors/Starts 20:00
Theater im Delphi | Online only – Website
Image (c) Christoph Voy
