The performative output to the two-year project The Shape of Things to Come, this piece was conceived to further develop and present the theoretical frameworks and speculative fictional world initiated by its first phase, examining the potential of artificial intelligence applied to theatre practises to generate insights for a better society. In this stage, the methodology was flipped as the subject was refined, and we used design fiction and performance practises to imagine a better future society enhanced by artificial intelligence. While the scope of the research was broad, the methodologies coalesced around feminist theories of embodiment, speculative fiction and worldbuilding, and the Grotowskian theatre practises used in the prior workshop.
Having initiated and led the Shape of Things to Come, Diana Neranti continued to helm the development of the performance, and invited theatre artist Kirsty Hamilton, along with myself, to begin researching the piece's thematics and develop its methodology. Throughout the first half of 2020, as Covid-19 hit Europe, we dedicated ourselves to researching different angles of the AI-embodiment intersection and gathering exercises for devising the piece, whenever that moment would come. Wenzel Mehnert led a short story writing session for worldbuilding, we dug into our theatre-exercise archives, and read quite a bit of science fiction; meanwhile, we also busied ourselves with the administration of formally setting up REPLICA as a financial entity and scheduling and rescheduling our devising rehearsals, through the constant tectonic shifts the pandemic brought.
By the summer, we were joined (virtually) by a couple more of our collaborators from last year: Mika Satomi would be returning to prototype new devices for the performance, and was eager to get a perspective on their foreseeable context ahead of time; and Joana Chicau joined us as we began looking into mythology as a thematic source. By summer's end, the aquatic associations of many of our mythological subjects had suggested the idea of a submarine life as a theme with which to anchor our speculative and design fiction, being one staple future for fiction since perhaps Jules Verne's Vignt-mille lieues sous la mer, and increasingly contemplated as a solution for various environmental problems. This gave some impetus to the design of the device, its form and its fictional raison d'être for transforming bodily movement into sound.
Diana compiled the collective research (in addition to a good deal more) into an enormous slideshow-as-dramaturgy-board. Kirsty and Joana, meanwhile, assembled a compendium of theatre exercises for easy reference in rehearsal; the idea had been floated to use these stochastically or algorithmically as a set of cards. In September, the entire technical team was assembled and began developing their respective contributions: Mika built the first prototype of the collar and fabric sensors; Meredith Thomas, who had also worked on the data capturing system the prior year, returned to build a recording system for the new suits, while Mika's husband Ingo Randolf constructed a system to synchronize the suit data with video recordings of our rehearsals; we approached the sound collective Kling Klang Klong to design the acoustic output from the suits, and worked particularly with co-founder Johannes Helberger and Lugh O'Neill, an independent sound artist and composer brought on by the Klongs.
At the end of September, we returned to Eden*****, where we had conducted the first part of our workshop the year prior, for the first phase of our rehearsals this year. This phase consisted of devising exercises, developing a common theatrical practice for the group, and delving into our source material while beginning to build performative modules. In addition to Diana, Kirsty, and myself, Saraï Ogara and Kate Ryan both returned to devise the piece, and were joined by Angela Monaco for a total of six. After some initial purely theatrical work, Mika brought in first the initial prototype collar device, then two more, and we gradually began to experiment with them and incorporate their dynamics into the work we'd been doing. We started with some default sound samples she'd programmed using Pure Data, then Johannes and Lugh brought in what they'd put together, and took a look at what we'd been working on to better get a sense of how to develop the acoustic aesthetic further.
The month of October largely consisted of following up on the work of the first rehearsal—analyzing emergent ideas to use for the second phase, building the technical elements, collating documentation—and something of a scramble for a second rehearsal space, as increasing pandemic-related restrictions removed most possibilities and demanded compensatory measures. In this effort, we were rather saved by the haven provided to us in the nick of time by the Berlin Open Lab, a workshop created and hosted by the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in collaboration with the Technische Universität Berlin for interdisciplinary artistic-scientific research and residencies: their new cross-reality space was unoccupied for large swathes of the day, and though not particularly designed for performance, it would serve as a flexible and inspirational base in which to work on our piece. This was largely thanks to the goodwill of Ewelina Dobrzalski, the UdK co-coordinator of Hybrid Plattform, another UdK-TU partnership for interdisciplinary research. Another piece of fortune, and one more unlooked-for, came in the form of Emma Collauzzo, a young Italian Erasmus student with a background in mixed-media and performance, who asked to be our intern. Though hardly a large enough organization to merit internship, we were convinced by her specific interest in us, familiarity with our work, and desire to explore the Berlin experimental art scene, and she turned out to be a tremendous aid during the busyness of the following several weeks. Just before beginning work in the space, we held another worldbuilding workshop, examining the prototype devices and generated data as archeological artifacts from the future, and drafting textual backstories, imagining their use in a society.
Finally, we arrived at the second phase of rehearsals, and began by studying the accumulated research and furthering our writing. We generated choreography and explored its interaction with the sonifying collars and the different soundscapes the Klongs and Lugh had devised. Linking movement and sound so has a particularly strong effect, and it was both fascinating and challenging to discover what worked with these altered dynamics. In addition to the underwater environment of our future society, we also focused on their relationship with their ancestors, how they might place themselves in the historical narrative, and keep their familial and societal histories alive.
As it became clear that a live performance would no longer be feasible within our time frame, we decided to record our work on film, as so many others have done, and present it at a later date. Though we might have preferred to find a remote way of broadcasting it live, so as to keep some of the performative aspect, this would be one more level of complexity than we were prepared to deal with, and it was clear that the piece would eventually need to be performed live in any case, if it was to be performed properly at all, given its highly space-specific dynamics (the sound from the performers) and our interest in making it interactive. Having video documentation, at least, can be a massive edge when it comes to applying for future opportunities. We thus sought out some competent filmmakers who could record our performance on the fly and produce a kind of trailer on the one hand and an edited-together performance on the other, and we were pleased to be put in touch with the team of Alexander Schmutzler, Rhys Anderson, and Mark Othmer, who not only said they could do it, but immediately brought both aesthetic ideas and their expertise to the process. On our last Friday in the BOL, we switched to filming mode, and the three-man team was a whirlwind of cameras, clapboards, and lights as they did the work of almost an entire crew; Kling Klang Klong, with Lugh, came with their own recording equipment as well, so as to get more and richer sound. Meanwhile Diana, who all would've liked to have perform, had decided to focus on directing as the end of the rehearsal period approached, which turned out to be even more needed for the filming than for a classical performance, to steer the whirlwind, the tech and performers and crews. After all was sung and done, we enjoyed a brief wrap, cleaned up, and returned home.
Almost four months later, after some extended and extensive editing by Diana and Mark, the full-length film was finally presented virtually by the Hybrid Plattform, in the context of a panel discussion of the process and results of the project, visible here.
It was the conclusion of quite a two years, thanks to a planning grant from the VolkswagenStiftung through the Wizenbaum-Institut für die vernetzte Gesellschaft, and we're looking forward to the prospect of performing a live version of the piece as soon as restrictions and opportunities allow.