Lecture About Myself
for two performers, quadrophonic sound, video and light
A fictional supercomputer gives a short lecture on the subject of artificial intelligence through the medium of text, image and sound. During its presentation, the protagonist confronts us with ideas that range from the benign to the provocative, in a manner that is both playful, convoluted and downright weird. Two musicians enter into a sort of transhumanist dialogue, communicating through a networked, machinic interface inspired by the concept of evolutionary linguistics and artist/scientist Luc Steels' AI robots who speak a language they themselves invented. The piece also draws on ideas from Golem XIV, a 1981 sci-fi novel by the Polish author Stanisław Lem, in which a supercomputer confronts humanity with various hard truths, not only about its future but also about its present. The retrofuturism of Lem’s book is collided into contemporary – and often antithetical - philosophies, via Donna Haraway and others, resulting in a cryptic mini-critique of the promise of homo sapiens’ salvation by artifiicial intelligence.
Performance: reConvert
[Lorenzo Colombo & Roberto Maqueda]
Video: Carl-John Hoffmann
Dramaturgical collaboration: Thomas Fiedler
Text and composition: Kaj Duncan David
Commissioned by reConvert
With support from the Danish Arts Council, KODA Kultur, Musikfonds/BKM and the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste Berlin
15.03.2020
version for video and 4ch sound only
Primavera en La Habana, Cuba
29.09.2019
performed by reConvert
Kontakte Festival,
Akademie der Künste, Berlin