It should be theater’s worst enemy, but artificial intelligence is slowly finding a role in live shows: at Avignon’s “off” Festival, robots and virtual reality are taking over the stage.
In the Grenier à Sel, one of the “off” stages, a curious rehearsal takes place. “It’s maxed out, the Nao,” “can you start Pepper’s behavior please?”
Pepper, a humanoid robot with an affable face, is the protagonist of “Bot4Human”, a theatrical performance by the students of the “We are the Robots” workshop at the École des Mines de Nancy that mixes artistic composition and robotic programming.
A manufacturer decides to retire all its robots due to a problem, but one of the owners keeps it to continue with their daily tasks. Little by little, the robot takes control of his life, telling him to come home at that time, that he eat healthy, that he not see too much of his girlfriend.
Can a robot on stage create excitement? Unlike movies and series, especially recently on Netflix, robosolution has made very little progress in the world of theater.
“We want the public to ask questions about human-robot interaction. The artists I work with tell me it’s a live performance,” says the professor.
What if artificial intelligence wrote your works? This is not exactly what “dSimon” (“Digital Simon”) is about, but almost.
This performance-conference, also given at the Grenier à Sel, is the work of the Uruguayan developer based in Geneva, Tammara Leites, and the Swiss visual artist and videographer Simon Senn.
Tammara trained an artificial intelligence to become a writer by giving her the personality of Simon, after integrating her personal data.
He then creates a site, metastories.ch, where it is possible to request a text from “dSimon” and interact with him. But “the author of the AI” sometimes gives completely inappropriate answers, even offensive.
If nothing explains the reasoning of this AI, which even converses with an artificial Elon Musk, the experience pushes Simon Senn to plunge into a somewhat terrifying introspection.
For Tammara Leites, “it is a show about artificial intelligence but that brings out the most human in us”.
Before “dSimon,” Simon Senn had crafted another even more haunting performance: “Be Arielle F.” He tells how he bought online the digital replica of a female body, that of a British student.
He “enters her body” thanks to virtual reality and then goes looking for her. In a moving scene, he strips naked on stage and finds himself discovering, thanks to virtual reality, a woman’s body, which he finds beautiful.
The experience raises questions: is it a “gender disorder” or does it have “Snapchat dysmorphia”, a psychological disorder that makes you want to show off your image online or is the use of filters massive? At the end of the show, the public is entitled to a real exchange with Arielle, the student, through FaceTime, as a return to the human.
Source: BFM TV
Emily Miller is a voice to be reckoned with in the world of opinion journalism. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a unique and thought-provoking perspective to current events and political issues, delivering insightful and engaging commentary.