Dancing with the machine: autoplay and the future of AI-driven art
Like huge wraiths, their shadows danced on the walls to a haunting soundtrack. Four dancers in identical cropped wigs and tunic dresses repeating sequences of gestures on the large turntable on the performance space.
Their movements and rhythms were simultaneously strange and familiar, the music they moved to a synthesis of organic and electronic. An integration of real and digital that in many ways is what life has become.
Later, the mournful, plaintive voice of singer Inge Beckmann pierced the air, transforming what had looked like an avant-garde ballet into something more akin to alternative opera, an amalgamation of dance moves, semi-synthetic music, human vocal gymnastics and screen projections.
And all of it coaxed the audience into some kind of altered state.
The show — billed as “Africa’s first AI opera” — is not easily categorised; it doesn’t neatly fit into any genre box. It’s more profound than the sum of its parts, refuses to give up its meaning and doesn’t pretend to have answers to the questions it provokes.
Choreographer Louise Coetzer is too smart and too interested in exploring the limits of creative possibility to pretend she has answers.
Instead, autoplay uses machine learning to venture down the rabbit hole, exploring ways in which humans can collaborate meaningfully with technology, or hand themselves over to it, potentially relinquishing their autonomy entirely.
Different each time it’s performed, autoplay is having a brief run at the Baxter’s Flipside Theatre in Cape Town after it premiered in an industrial warehouse in the city last year.
“The entire performance is an experiment in collaborating with machine learning,” says Coetzer, who co-founded the dance theatre collective Darkroom Contemporary.
Coetzer is known for incorporating elements of chance into her shows and autoplay was created using input from generative AI which she has been exploring as part of a wider body of research.
“I have done works where the whole piece is about how the audience selects what happens next. In autoplay, I started those discussions with different AI platforms.
“Initially, the responses were silly and predictable — stupid things such as making the performers look like machines. But I would respond by saying, ‘No, I want it to be more conceptual, more abstract.’”
Coetzer reports that the platforms adapted to her way of thinking, played along with her interest in something deeper and supplied her with more radical options.
“Eventually, the responses became a lot more interesting because the AI platform had realised I wasn’t after such obvious choices; that I wanted something more unusual,” she says.
She’s clear that, while AI has been a collaborator, a sounding board for ideas and a generator of options, autoplay is very much a work for and by humans. “It comes from this very artificial thing that gives these inputs but I’ve filtered those through my own humanness,” she says.
The piece is in some sense a re-imagining of the biblical story of creation. Despite the presence of real apples in this show, though, it’s not quite the Garden of Eden. Rather, it’s an alternative beginning, with (Apple) computers the source of infinite knowledge in a world where we humans collaborate with AI to re-engineer our own genesis.
This is a version of creation in which machine learning enables us to reconstruct ourselves, not so much in God’s image, but as a series of godlike 1s and 0s.
And so autoplay contemplates what happens when we allow algorithms to dictate the next step. Whether that step is the next sequence in a choreographed dance piece or the next step in our evolution, what it confronts audiences with is the question of what happens when human creativity itself becomes consumed by digital processes.
Coetzer does, to some extent, wish to terrify us — or at least wake us up.
“I want to prompt reflection. I think it’s necessary with art to instigate thought. I’m not trying to preach or force my opinion, but perhaps it’s worth reflecting that there is some crazy shit going down.”
She would like her fellow humans to pay attention to the deep changes that are occurring thanks to the many ways in which machine learning has infiltrated our lives.
“I think it’s interesting how unalarmed we are about AI and its ability to morph beyond our control. There’s very little concern from people. We’re all just happily consuming.
“We’re, like, ‘Oh, there’s another app to play with!’ but paying no heed to the possible dangers.
“That’s an interesting tension and I’m always interested in the tension in things, because that is what our experience is — it’s navigating these tensions between the real and this really artificial-virtual space that we increasingly find ourselves in.”
A crucial part of autoplay’s hybrid mix of artistic forms is the music, a dazzling interplay of human voice, digitisation, improvisation and live mixing.
Created by Beckmann with composers Njabulo Phungula and Brydon Bolton, the soundscape is a captivating force, edging the work into a sublime, in-between space at the intersection of organic and synthetic, human and digital. It doesn’t merely haunt, it consumes the air molecules and causes your brain to vibrate at a different frequency.
That’s how I felt, at least.
It’s this thrilling interaction between human and technological creativity that sparks autoplay’s quandary: the question is what happens if these things — dancing, creative expression, human voices — become subsumed by machines, infiltrated by digital corrections, polished and perfected by algorithms that know us and know our hopes, desires, and even our dreams, better than we do? Do we really want to live in an artificially perfect world?
Coetzer says there is a sense of loss: “It’s in the process of creating that we, as humans, learn, become smarter, or discover new things. To just hand that over to AI, is robbing ourselves of something.”
She hopes the audience will wonder whether the performers are playing human characters or not: “Are they mechanical? Are they something in between? Are they a new organism that has been coaxed into existence?”
In a sense, autoplay reimagines the dawn of time but commencing at this moment when we are intensely tied to machines. It ponders how we evolve in relation to the machines we’re living alongside, that are increasingly ingrained in our social fabric.
Coetzer is in two minds about whether she’d like to be around to witness how AI’s impact on human evolution will play out.
“It’s like Brian Eno said, whoever is designing this stuff is designing the future, and it’s not somebody who’s interested in making the world better, it’s somebody who’s trying to get rich quickly, and we’re basically going along with it. I think we’re going to see a lot of crazy, crazy stuff.”
In the meantime, autoplay is a reminder to exercise our creative autonomy. A reminder that it is human to sing and dance and play.
autoplay is on at the Baxter Flipside in Cape Town until 29 March.