Prologue: The Execution of the Sunrise

2018
28 min, 5 - channel sound installation, light, Display, Animation, Flyer
AvantGarden Theatre
Trondheim, Norway

Prologue: The Execution of the Sunrise is an automated play, made in collaboration between Suijkerbuijk and artificial intelligent agents as his “creative companions”. Script, screams, stutters and sounds for the performance are generated through this joint effort, into a performance best characterised as an amalgam of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the Futurist Synthetic Theatre. The protagonist – a disembodied intelligence (DI)– of the play is mediated through a voice, drawn from Felix Guatarri’s science fiction film script A Love of UIQ. It narrates through textures of sound, light and voice, the DI’s absurd climax of omnipotent but invisible singularity, and questions if intelligence is reasonable and human in the first place. The play creatively thinks beyond a stage engaged by physical human actors, and explores the possibilities of machines, automation and control engaged in, and constituting theatre performance. It dismantles a fashionable technological fetishism by placing our present human condition on the drawing board, and explores alternative ways to live the future through the theatre.

Excerpt