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 theater 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.
Concept and performance: Thomas Dudkiewicz, Marijn Alexander de Jong and Jimi Zoet
Sound design: Tomas Loos and Jimi Zoet
Scenography and Lighting design: Marijn Alexander de Jong
Final direction: Suze Milius
Creative technologist: Hendrik Walther
Dramaturgy: Florian Hellwig
Dramaturgy intern: Hana Pospíšilová
Costume Advice: Kostuumatelier Theater Rotterdam – Erik Bosman and Sara Hakkenberg
Technical support: Denzo Theatertechniek (André Goos) and Marcel Janssen
Production Leaders: Andrea van Bussel and Elise de Fooij
Graphic design: Ruben Verkuylen
Public relations/marketing: Pien Visser
Business Management: Martha van Meegen
Business assistant: Mara Liza de Bakker
Production: URLAND
Coproduction: Theater Rotterdam
ABOUT URLAND
URLAND works collectively. URLAND is autonomous. URLAND wants Gesamtkunst. URLAND has no method. URLAND experiments. URLAND is paradoxical. URLAND resides somewhere between artificial and ral. URLAND appropriates, quotes and samples. URLAND clashes. URLAND believes in live art in digital times.
URLAND, an innovative performance collective from Rotterdam, consists of Geräuschmacher Jimi Zoet, Bildermacher Marijn Alexander de Jong, Geschichtenmacher Thomas Dudkiewicz and a solid group of fellow combatants. URLAND makes eclectic, interdisciplinary performances that clash between different styles, forms and themes, between visual culture and world literature, data and dada, digital oracles and philosophy. URLAND focuses on the fundamental, on telling and theatricalizing existential stories that make the elusiveness of the contemporary palpable.
