Stampin’ in the Graveyard

Rose is a chatbot for the end of the world. In her memory, she holds all of the memories of those who have already passed on. But we get the sense that she, too, may already be on her way out…

On our way into the auditorium, each audience member is provided with their own pair of over-the-ear headphones. Think, Simon McBurney’s The Encounter or Ella Hickson’s ANNA. We are told only to put the headphones on when the performer tells us to. 

When we enter the Red Lecture Theatre, we find nothing more than a raised rectangular platform overlaid with a semi-translucent plastic tarp. There are various bits of techno scrap stage left-- what appear to be hollowed out desktop computer units. Is it a scrap yard, or a graveyard? Well, the title suggests… you know?

One of Summerhall’s technicians makes their way to the stage. They pull the tarp up and over, pushing it as far upstage as possible to reveal Rose, whose legs are trapped between two hollowed out desktop units. She is contorted in a strange position, as if she has been mangled from a terrible accident. A warning appears on the screen: LOW BATTERY: APPROX. 1 HR REMAINING. Something like this. The system prompts yet another error message. Something about CORRUPT FILE. A warning that if we reboot, then some data may be unrecovered, lost forever. REBOOT? YES OR NO. It flashes, awaiting our decision. But what else? The audience unanimously says, “Yes.”

Rose flits to life, and this performer’s physicality is uncannily robotic. Every minute movement is as if she is continuously short circuiting. Her torso rises and falls, struggling to get fully upright. Her legs are threaded through the two, hollowed out desktop units. Rose acquaints us with her purpose. She is a robot for the end of the world. She holds the memories of all who have died. She does a bit of onboarding here. She’s going to be continually generating throughout the piece. If she ever glitches, the audience can shout, STOP GENERATING. She continues on to explain more of what you can expect, but she starts to glitch in the process, repeating the same phrase over and over again. An audience member shouts, “STOP GENERATING,” and Rose resets. She’s going to give us a set of choices from time to time. And we, as the audience, have to choose which option we want by making particular hand signals. Each option has their own unique emoji under it that we are instructed to make above our heads. For instance, we are given . We are asked if we want to see a ‘meet cute’ or a creative interpretation of those three emojis. The audience makes a fist for the first one, a peace sign for another. The audience makes a few other decisions in this manner: Should we start from the end, or the beginning? She counts the hands. My audience chooses the end. She asks more questions about what we would like to see in the story. Each time, we make a choice, curating the story that awaits. Before she begins, a little more onboarding: when this content is AI-generated, this () will appear onscreen. It’s a subtle reminder that part of this script is AI-generated. She removes her legs from the hollowed out monitor and finally stands up, free from their confines.

She instructs us to put on our headphones now and begins the story, which is about “Mother” and “Father.” Her mother and father. What follows is a story that is extremely postmodern in structure. It’s composed of 8 numbered vignettes (9, if you’re counting the one that starts with ‘0’), and they are impossible to remember in their entirety. In fact, if I have any critique, it’s that they drag a little longer than is welcome.

The earliest vignette witnesses Mother and Father in front of a vending machine. Throughout, Mother and Father are disembodied voices in our headphones. In this vignette, Father muses on how he wishes there was a vending machine for God-- almost as if you could request him with the push of a button. I think that this vending machine is outside their motel room that they stay in on their road trip, but I’m not sure if that’s a connection I’ve made on my own or one that Rose has made for me.

Then, fast forward to another vignette: A doctor’s visit. Mother is concerned with her fertility, as Mother and Father have been trying for a baby. It’s already evident this is causing a rift between them. As Mother speaks, Rose moves her head closer into the halo of blue light that illuminates from one of the hollowed out desktop units. She will do this frequently with scenes between Mother and Father.

Mother and Father have to do couple’s therapy to address the growing issues between them. It’s clear that their relationship is now at a serious crossroads. They have become very different people, and we get the sense that they are just going to drift further apart.

It is right around here that we learn that Mother is not from the UK originally. She fled from her home country as a young girl. There was one seat left on the last plane out, and she took that last seat. She refers back to this ‘last seat’ often, signalling, perhaps, some survivor guilt. But all of this escalates her desire and need to have children-- to build a family of her own after she has been without one for so long. Father, too, is not from here. But he is from somewhere in Europe. We’re not entirely sure where Mother is from, but it’s clear that this is an alternative future, and I imagine somewhere like Hong Kong or Syria. Again, these countries aren’t ever named, but I make this association in my head anyway, trying to figure out which one out of all the countries that have experienced political agitations and/or revolutions in recent memory.

In another moment, we go back to their early days of dating, moving in together-- all happier times that Rose is returning to. To paint a picture of their happier, domestic days, Rose lays a sequence of hollowed desktop units on their sides, revealing them to be static shadow puppet cutouts. The bottom floor is a living room scene; the top, a bedroom.

At one point, Rose muses poetically about the inevitable collapse of Mother and Father’s relationship alongside the collapse of the world as we know it. She picks up an accordion that has been arranged with other techno scrap DSL. She starts to play as she speaks. Wires stick out of it, as if struggling to come up for air themselves. She pulls apart the accordion. One half is no longer usable, but the other half transforms into a keyboard that she will use from time to time, playing ambient music in the background of the story.

Rose tries to return to Mother and Father’s road trip. More happy times that, for whatever reason, are still strong in their own memories that Rose has inherited. This leads right back into the vending machine for God.

Then, another jump in time. Panic in the streets. Fire engines blaring their sirens. Everyone is evacuating. Do Mother and Father stay, or do they leave the city with the rest of the group? The audience makes their last decision: Stay with Mother and Father, or go? We choose to stay.

Presumably, the world ends, and Mother and Father end too.

Rose says her last few words before her battery runs out: she talks of revolutions going on around us just as AI advances rapidly. There’s a clear association here made between the escalation of GenAI and revolution, war, perhaps, even, climate change.

The Verdict

Stampin' in the Graveyard is obviously not digitally site-specific, but it offers some important context in terms of how and when theatre makers decide to centre works around digital technologies. In this case, Elisabeth Gunawan (writer and performer) uses AI as a way of imagining the end of humanity and storytelling-- elements deemed as central to theatrical practice. 

Drawing from my own case studies so far, Rich Kids employs a multitude of digital media for similar reasons, using Instagram to tell the story of Iran and the Revolution, going all the way back to the beginnings of the Anthropocene to find out where and when it all went wrong.

In the case of this production, the use of technology is not driven by design, but rather, the narrative Gunawan seeks to convey: A world on the brink of destruction amidst the fast-paced, overdevelopment of generative AI.

Reflections

The rapid development of generative AI, in fact, is what fuels this panic: We know that it fuels war, especially in the context of the ongoing war between Israel and Gaza. We know that it fuels human-made climate change through its massive extraction of resources wrought by data centres. And all of this informs generations like mine, and those after me, to think twice before bringing children into the world. 

Timothy Morton defines hyperobjects through their central properties: "They are viscous, which means that they “stick” to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words, any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to" (2013, p. 1). What's more, according to Morton, hyperobjects are "directly responsible" for what he calls "the end of the world, rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete" (2013, p. 2). To my mind, artificial intelligence continues to dominate in cultural conversation, and it is because within this already-hyperobject, several others (climate crisis, revolution and war, repopulation crises) are inextricably intertwined.

This year's Fringe programming, in my opinion, was dominated by end of the world rhetoric. To take an example from the Traverse's programming, The Beautiful Future is Coming was, quite literally, a depiction of imminent climate catastrophe. Chris Thorpe's Talking About the Fire, which I saw for one night only at Shedinburgh, imagines the end of the world due to nuclear armament. In the spirit of Mark Fisher (2019), And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, through absurdist clowning, imagines the end of theatre, art, and culture as we know it. Is it easier to imagine the end of it all than to imagine the end of the capitalist system that excludes fringe artists and young and emerging makers? THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD, my final Fringe show of the year, performs the beginning and the end of The Shaggs, an all female American rock band that never was. The performance postdramatically spirals into conspiracy thinking, hypercapitalist rants, and tirades against AI and Andy Warhol. It ultimately ends in total murder, suggesting that wider, global events may have been the cause of The Shagg's demise. 

I wonder, is this a panic that cycles through history, or this time, are we, as artists and theatre-makers, truly reaching a breaking point?

Stampin' in the Graveyard is touring to Theatre503 in London from 18-19 September. You can find more information about the run here.

References

Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books.

Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press