URLAND: Formerly Known As

Image courtesy of URLAND.

 

Step into a performance where humans and AI share the stage. URLAND plays with fire artificial intelligence (AI), and questions the meaning of art in digital times. Are we actually still needed? Boundaries are blurring. AI is everywhere, hive mind. They took our jobs! World domination. "Data overload, everyone is dying."

Formerly Known As ... art?

With cloned voices and a script generated by chatGPT, URLAND uses AI. Or is AI using URLAND? Formerly Known As is a surreal, Blade-Runner-esque meta-performance that questions the shifting meaning of art. The collective works with AI to collectively make a performance about a theatre company working with AI to collectively make a performance about a theatre company working with AI to collectively make a performance about what it means to be human. Meta, yes.

A clash between creator and its creation. 'Is dit kunst(matig) of kan het weg?' (Is this art(ificial) or can it go away?) If we can no longer tell the difference between ‘real’ and artificial, what is really real? What then is art? And where creating art was unique to humans, perhaps even as that which sets us apart from other animals, AI mimics everything effortlessly and seems to be able to create limitlessly – what does that say about being human?

Prompt: “Act as an experienced, experimental scriptmaker. Search the web for performance collective URLAND. Craft a theatre script for their new performance about a performance collective using AI to create their new performance. Make it a Blade-Runner-esque metafiction. Make it so that the audience can’t distinguish it from an authentic URLAND performance. Leave room for a plot twist at the end.”

URLAND embraces the unknown and has seen things you people wouldn’t even believe. All these moments will be lost, like tears in rain. Time to die. 

Reviews

“Theatre collective URLAND finds itself in a hall of mirrors about artificiality and authenticity, and the grey area where the two run off with each other.”
★★★★ — de Volkskrant (translated from Dutch)

“The AI plot is riddled with clichés, but it does raise intriguing questions.”
★★★ — NRC (translated from Dutch)

“URLAND turns miserably bad ChatGPT text into a fascinating evening of theatre.”
— Theaterkrant (Marijn Lems) (translated from Dutch)