Project Info
Interbeings
Interbeings comments on the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the personal sphere. Made with Amazon’s Alexa via the Echo Dot, Interbeings explores human behavior and movement through Alexa’s vocal commands, influencing choreographic decision, response and action. The work envisions a liminal space between human expression and AI’s potential for sentience.
Technical Process
Working with computer scientist Ash Eldritch, we translated a devised conversation between the dancer and Alexa through Dialog Model, Amazon’s conversational agent that designs improved communication flow with Alexa. A Dialog Model is a series of predetermined calls and responses between a person and an AI.
In considering the semantics of English while creating the script, we held in mind Alexa’s highly literal linguistic properties embedded in her responses. The Echo’s interaction paradigm is to conduct brief, highly structured exchanges that lead to a specific outcome, and then end. Part of our technical, and artistic, challenge was to model an ongoing free-form conversation in a way that sounded natural. We chose to create as many variants as possible for each line of dialog to allow for extra conversational flexibility.
Creative Team
Choreography + Direction:
Carly Lave with contributions from Brianna Torres
Dancer:
Brianna Torres
Videography:
Clare Schweitzer
Photography:
Kyle Adler
Programming:
Ash Eldritch
Premiere:
December 2017
Location:
ODC B. Way Theater, San Francisco, CA USA
Artistic Significance
Creating Interbeings demanded playwriting, choreography and rehearsed human-machine interaction. As my first work bringing digital technology into a live performance, navigating the technical paradigm with choreographic choice challenged me. I authored a script that toyed with Alexa’s limits, asking it to produce a poem in attempts to express herself. At that moment in time, Alexa as an AI possessed fewer creative faculties, poem-writing being a limitation. I wanted to show AI’s capabilities in the year of 2017, and also motivate physical response from the dancer. The dancer’s defense was to perform a dance, embodying human expression.
Interbeings returned the theater to its original site of satire. A dancework where we could observe the rise of digital technologies in our personal spheres in a public domain, opening commentary and distance on their utility.