Theatre Tech Talks: Artificial Intelligence, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre

Host Tjaša Ferme chats with playwright Chisa Hutchinson about her play, Bleeding Class. Chisa was aiming to write a wacky satire about a global pandemic, but then everything came true. She says she’s not clairvoyant, but has always been just a bit before her time!

Host Tjaša Ferme talks to multimedia artist Sister Sylvester about Drinking Brecht/Good Genes, which cautions how simplistic readings of genetics have always led to fascism. Join a label-defying conversation about the absence of authority in theatre and becoming an amateur geneticist to read the DNA on Brecht’s hat.

Creative director and choreographer Brandon Powers takes host Tjaša Ferme on a deep exploration of the merging of extended reality (XR) with theatre. He explains how theatremakers’ knowledge as spatial creatures is exactly what the virtual reality (VR) world is looking for.

Host Tjaša Ferme has a lighthearted chat with director, choreographer, and filmmaker Mary John Frank about the climate, virtual reality (VR) musicals, why VR works better in “one take,” and how and why to make theatre in VR at all.

Host Tjaša Ferme and media artist Ellen Pearlman discuss Ellen’s projects Language is Leaving Me and Noor: A Brain Opera. They go on a deep, granular dive into the loab: the psychic, unconscious, dark side of artificial intelligence rendering; the future of language depositories; and why all this matters seismically!

In this conversation with Kat Mustatea we chat about her project, BodyMouth, that is also a new instrument where a dancer’s movements prompt a speech synthesizer. For an extra twist, we ponder if we could use this instrument to reverse and decode the messages behind Tai Chi or the magical gestures of Carlos Castaneda.

Fareeda Pasha wrote The Last Word based on Michael Levin's research on the first robots from living cells. We had a lighthearted conversation about spooky action at a distance in playwriting, equal-opportunity inspiration, and how plays on science can change the world of business, art, and medicine.

In this episode, Emma Bexell from Bombina Bombast, a performing arts company in Malmö, Sweden, takes us to the space of gamified society and theatre. Bombina Bombast combines documentary audio, gaming interface, and immersive installation in a Virtual Reality show where audience members can rest with insomniac Swedish gang members—all while criticizing the attention economy.

Disabled choreographer, dancer, designer, engineer, and founding member of Kinetic Light Laurel Lawson talks about performing aerially in a wheelchair, accessibility as its own artform rather than an add-on, and their app Audimance which includes haptic interpretation and sensory modulation.

In this episode we talk with the founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, Rubén Polendo, about the hope for the future that inspired Utopian Hotline—now traveling through space as part of the Golden Record. We also discuss the gore, myth, and puppet-robots with their own point of view in Jodorowsky-inspired Santa Sangre.

Annemarie Hagenaars is an astronomer, physicist, and actress. In this playful conversation with Tjaša, Annemarie speculates about Einstein's famous equations, love, and shares her own experiment that she conducted with her one woman show The Story of the Einstein Girl, where she performs the play four different ways and lets the audience choose.

LaJuné shares about the inception of Black Movement Library: a database of motion capture data from Black folks they created, while seeking to avoid the paradigms of erasure, extraction, and exploitation of Black bodies. In their work, they encourage freedom and personal expression over correct data capture. They believe none of us are just numbers, and to treat our movements in our bodies as just data sets is very harmful.

This week, Tjaša speaks with Josh Corn, a true renaissance man. He uses technology to tell absurd and subversive stories about humanity. Josh built René—the most technologically advanced robotic arm from 2002, who had her own circus act. He also made Field Day Games where you can compete with groups over video call to spill, drop, break, crack, ignite, and burn machines in their studio. Everyone wins except Josh. He has to clean up.

Maud discusses monsters, and the “humanization process”: the idea that humanity asks of us to leave some part of the world at the door and opt in for a very specific, very small part of all that life has to offer. They also dissect the West’s capitalist need to reject the consciousness of inanimate objects in order to participate in the consumer culture.

In this episode, Tjaša chats with director Igor Golyak of Arlekin Players about the power of virtual theatre and the experience of using technology that had never before been used for live performance. And if you were wondering why there was a twelve-foot robotic arm on stage, serving coffee and sweeping the floor in The Orchard at Baryshnikov Center, Igor thinks that’s what Chekhov would have wanted.

Guest Heidi Bosivert believes that our bodies are archives of stories and if we can't get those stories out, the whole fabric of society will break down. When she worked in tech, addressing social issues, she had a crisis of faith and figured that bringing people into physical spaces and working with the body might be one way of mitigating deleterious effects of technology. Now, she’s creating a media biogenome.