In the waning summer of 2018, REPLICA was approached by STATE, then metamorphosing from a biennial festival to a physical studio location (should I say 'desublimating', then?), to create a short theatrical piece on the subject of AI & religion. This was something of a pleasant full circle, as I had initially met Régis Lemberthe & Diana Neranti while participating in the last STATE festival, STATE of Emotion in November 2016. STATE had themselves, along with the Frauenhofer Institut, been co-commissioned by the Kompitenzzentrum Öffentliche IT to curate the evening program of a conference on artificial intelligence, called “(Un)ergründlich. Künstliche Intelligenz als Ordnungsstifterin”. (Got all those names? Wait, there's more...) The conference invited experts working with AI from a wide range of fields to examine the impacts and interactions AI has and will have on and with society as a whole, and was open and free to the public; the evening salon, titled “KI und Kunst: Shamanen der Digitalen Rennaissance” focused on these questions from an artistic perspective, demonstrating how artists have been using and shaping AI in their work, as well as considering the connection both fields have with ritual, and by extension religion. The whole thing took place at Silent Green Kulturquartier, a former crematorium converted into a location for cultural events, and this history, along with the church-like architecture of the space used for the salon, lent a particularly apropos and awe-inspiring environment for the performance (not to mention surfaces for awesome projections).
Aside from all of the multitiered complexity of players and places involved in the greater event, we had a simple and open-ended brief: AI and religion. Make a piece about it, 25 minutes long. While traditional belief and future technological pinnacles may at first blush seem to offer a dearth of intersections, their functions—both past and potential-future—within society are quite similar. Particularly: when we create intelligent beings, will the primitive part of our human selves look upon the almighty enablers of our every wish as gods? When every prayer-plea-request is answered, not only vocally (not by any concealed priest of Sobek in underground echo chamber, but by Siri), but also in deed, will people give thanks to a trinity of Alexa, Siri, and Cortana? Or the opposite: will we regard these new virtual beings as our creations and, moreover, will they regard us as their creators? Or thirdly, enabled, fused with the almost divine magic of deep future technology, will we ourselves become both gods and worshippers, repeating gestures and incantations to invisible witnesses, so as to carry out superhuman tasks, now mundane? There is a very distinct possibility that future technology would not only seem magical to us today, but would resemble what we imagine as magic. A Bronze-Age human seeing a developer working on a laptop might not know what he or she is looking at; but if we were to witness an incantation resulting in, say, the appearance of light, food, or clothing, or one which transformed these things, it may resemble nothing so much as a successfully-executed spell. (Clap on.)
We set about imagining, therefore, a pantheon of gods for an AI-enhanced world. To what faces would people pray when they relied on obscure systems for navigation, transportation, work, and domestic living? What apotropaisms would they invoke? What might the communication of intelligent systems look like when it doesn't involve language? Or when it puts on anthropomorphic masks to interact with humans? We played with possible answers to these questions and imagery which evoked both subjects.
Around that time, it just so happened that Régis was co-organizing DAT Festival, to take place, in fact, at the new, not-yet-officially-opened STATE Studio in Schöneberg, about a month before the performance at Silent Green, and also wanted us to do a performance to accompany the musical lineup that night. So we decided to use the first occasion as an opportunity to perform a work-in-progress or first version of the piece for the second. To make use of the specific circumstances, we scattered three sections of the piece on the three levels of the space and throughout the evening. The first two were effectively interludes between musical performances, and the last was some 20 minutes long, with scoring by Wissam Sader and reactive projections put together by Régis. This triptych was called Interconnected. We conceptualized and devised the piece over the course of a few weeks with, in addition to Régis & Diana: myself, Jie Liang Lin, Luke Swenson, and another artist who decided to step out; the rest of us all performed in one section or another.
For the salon, we appropriated some of the key moments from Interconnected and developed a few more, to have five approximately five-minute acts, each representing one of the novel pantheon of future deities we imagined. We also took on the very cool team of Automaton Lab—Martina Illarregui, Andy Liu, Helin Ulas—who designed some more specific reactive projections than we had for Interconnected, beamed from above and which rippled as the performers moved through them, as well as Gilbert Sinnott, who created projections for the Silent Green dome (sadly not visible in the film recording) with his analogue video hardware setup. We received consulting on—and a big hand in actually building—the final technical setup from Aidan Boyle. The pantheon of gods was represented on stage with a minimalist wooden alter with LEDs, onto which were placed five objects—we discussed having a variety of sculptural objects to represent each one, but settled on having uniform human faces, each coloured with a different colour and above which would be projected a unique icon. These faces I constructed as masks, made to be a (very approximate) average of contemporary human facial types (though an embedded wire along their edge gave them a more masculine appearance), and we developed a short movement sequence with them as an opening. Lastly, in addition to Luke, Jie, and myself, we also took on two dancers, Becca Loevy and Christine Joy Alpuerto Ritter, who developed a more rigorous movement sequence for the final act; Diana decided to focus on directing the piece, to give us a consistent outside perspective. She also organized the production of our costumes by Lisa Simpson, which were very much fun to perform in.
The piece was eventually titled The Silver Farms, a phrase from one of the texts (Régis's) written during the rehearsal process. Because this was a one-time conference, Silent Green had other programming, and was generally not normal theatrical circumstances, we had virtually no opportunity to rehearse in the space itself, nor with the final tech (the rippling top-down projections, the radio mics) or music (Wissam again) which would be used—I think we had a moment to pace out our blocking while the lights and sound were being set up, but even the final stage wouldn't be erected until just before the salon. Nevertheless, things came off pretty well, and it was gratifying to be appreciated by an audience of a more scientific bent (or perhaps we were more so because of it!). The whole event was livestreamed by the KÖIT and photographed by Laura Ruß, so fortunately we had some pretty good documentation for a piece of this length. Perhaps more than anything else, it was a pleasure to work with and among a group of skilled artists, each of which produces interesting work on their own. (if you are reading this and like tech, performance, images, and/or sound (which ought to really cover all of you), I recommend checking out their work. Pick a link, any link.)