YOU AND A.I.
Game-Theatre Digital Culture Theatre & Performance
Game theatre You and A.I. deals with the possibilities of participation in digital systems. Guided by their smartphones, the players take a journey through the city. The goal is to train an artificial intelligence towards becoming more human. On the way, they solve puzzles, collect data and thus play their way closer and closer towards the control centre of a voracious learning machine. Finally, they must decide whether they want to become part of the machine or to fight against it.
You and A.I. was developed by New Zealand group Binge Culture and premiered in Wellington in 2021. Now, the FFT presents the German premiere in a new production by machina eX. Binge Culture was founded in Wellington in 2008 and has been working on immersive, participatory productions that have been shown at home and abroad since then. They have been in productive artistic contact with machina eX for years. The desire arose to make each other’s work better known in their own respective homelands. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, however, the groups wanted to dispense with emission-intensive guest performance tours and instead attempt a model in which one collective adapts the other’s production on site. As part of this piece exchange, Binge Culture showed the machina eX’s work „Disaster“ in Wellington.
After the premiere, there will be an audience discussion with both groups: machina eX will be on site, Binge Culture will join in from New Zealand. This will be an English-language conversation.
cast
Performance: N.N.
Artistic Direction: Clara Ehrenwerth
Technical Direction: Lasse Marburg
Production and Costume Design: Dilara Göksügür
Sound Design: Matthias Millhoff
Production management: Sina Kießling / Production assistant: N.N.
Original concept by Joel Baxendale (Director), Ralph Upton (Dramaturgy), Oliver Devlin (Sound Design), Ian Shepherd (App Development), Lucas Neal (Performance Design), Liam Dakin (Graphic Design), Joe ‚Digl‘ Dixon (Video Design), Pauline Ward (Production Management) and Eleanor Strathern (Production).
credits
Production: machina eX, FFT Düsseldorf. Funded by the International Co-Production Fund of the Goethe Institute and Goethe Institute New Zealand. The original production received support by Creative New Zealand, Wellington City Council, and CubaDupa.
ON/LIVE is organised in cooperation with the medienwerk.nrw office. The guest performance of In Skills We Trust as well as the ON/LIVE accompanying programme receive support from Fonds Darstellende Künste, with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. You and A.I. is funded by the NRW KULTURsekretariat and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.