What Could Festivals and AI Possibly Have to Do with Each Other?
At the end of last month, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society announced that it would be partnering with Anthropic once again to deliver a series of workshops aimed at Fringe artists.
Astonished (What do you mean, again? And why?), the logical next step was to repost the news with a simple message:
Just the day before, I was tasked with speaking at the European Festivals Association’s Art Summit, which was coincidentally being hosted at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, just a five minute walk from my office. This was an interesting proposition, which is why I took it on in the first place. I have had serious skepticism about this wave of AI since ChatGPT first launched to the public.
Past and Present AI Panic
Recently, I finally had the chance to read Czech playwright Karel Capek’s R.U.R. The play, written in 1920, is most famous for introducing the term “robot” to the English language. In the play, the characters in charge of Rossum’s Universal Robots Corporation are much like the Robots themselves: always logic, yet optimistic solutionists. This may sound just a bit familiar… The moral centre of the play is Helena Glory, the daughter of a much-admired president. Interestingly enough, Capek was a known close acquaintance to the first President of Czechoslovakia… but I digress. Helena is like many of the artists I speak with today. She argues that Robots, made in man’s image, must have feelings just like us. They must feel pain and suffering, heartache and joy. But when Helena posits this to the Robots the surround her, they counter her. They are Robots. They feel nothing. They have no fleshy heart or brain or any of the bodily organs that humans have.
Towards the end of the play (*spoilers*), the engineers at RUR begin to give their Robots the capacity to feel things like pain. This snowballs into a Robot worker uprising, in which the Robots ultimately kill every last human on Earth save one.
Even at 105 years-old, this play still captures our contemporary outlook on the (perceived) “AI takeover.”
Knowing that (very likely) many people at the Arts Summit would hold the same convictions, how could I possibly promote the use of AI to such an audience?
Virtual and Hybrid Potentials…
Last year, applied research company Altera announced that they had successfully deployed 1,000+ autonomous agents in Minecraft to conduct various simulations. They called it Project Sid. In one set of experiments, they ran two different simulations: one, in which Kamala Harris was President, and another, Donald Trump. The agents showcased capabilities in the area of democratic policy-making, voting on amendments to their respective constitutions in the areas of police presence, for instance. I can already here my fellow Americans laughing from across the pond…
But I’ve been thinking about hybrid potentials for theatre since before the Pandemic. And since the start of my PhD, I’ve been thinking about hybrid festival experiences. In an age of global uncertainty, rising costs for travel, accommodation, and production, is it not too far-fetched to propose a sort-of digital shadow of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for instance? And could we get autonomous agents to do some of the initial world-building for us?
Social VR is nothing new, and there are many ready-made platforms that are suitable for hosting live events (see Pandemic-era experiments in Roblox, Animal Crossing, and Fortnite, for instance). However, these advancements mean that developers in the future will be able to build their own social VR sites quicker and with the help of autonomous agents.
But for those of you more technologically-minded, you’re likely seeing a whole host of issues: lack of money, lack of computing power, potential waste of natural resources. At the same time, in the face of exponential growth in quantum computing, it’s hard to say how all of that will shake out in a year’s time, let alone 30.
I know Social VR is niche, but so are traditional festivals like the Fringe, no?…
And for those of you more creatively-minded, you might be thinking, why? Well, for those artists that can’t get the visas to perform at the festival of their choosing. For those enthusiastic, far flung audiences who have always wanted to go but can’t afford the plane ticket. For those relegated to the home due to doctor’s orders. And maybe for those artists who simply see loads of experimental potential in digital forms?
This is not a staunch belief I have, per se. It’s simply one possible future out of thousands. One potential simulation if you will.
But I do have one strong stance in relation to AI, and to generative AI in particular. A lot will have to change in the areas of intellectual property, reporting on metadata, transparency, multi-modality, sustainability before it can ever become a suitable terrain for live performance.
