Computer as Character

Traditionally, theatre has consisted of performers on a stage telling a story to an audience against the backdrop of lights and sets. This was the accepted mode for most of our performance history and has proven to be a successful method of entertainment for thousands of years. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, have introduced technology that allows both theatre-makers and audiences to experience storytelling in new and innovative ways unimaginable to the performers, designers, and audiences of yesterday. My area of study in the University of Montana’s College of Visual and Performing Arts focuses on these innovations and asks: how do we story tell when digital media is incorporated into our performance environment? Does the blending of live performance and digital media aid in the storytelling? How does it influence the performance for the actor/audience? What if the actor can interact to the media incorporated? Working with these questions, I’m currently building a performance piece that incorporates an interface which allows an actor to hold a conversation with a computer. The interface, more commonly known as a ‘chatbot’ works through combining JavaScript, HTML, and an open source coding language called RiveScript to create a program that resembles an Alexa or Siri voice recognition system. However, my concept differs from both examples in that it has been built with the intent that it challenges, through a performative lens, questions of machine as live performer. Daniel Shiffman’s Coding Train tutorials served as inspiration for the project. The performance, itself, consists of the actor asking the computer a series of questions and the computer responding with answers that are sometimes set and predictable but at other times varied and randomized. The purpose of this is to produce a unique scene for the audience and live performer that is at once different each time it is performed yet depends on an unchanging digital system that is not ‘live’ yet fulfills the role of a character. The piece serves as an example of theatre that reflects our current culture and the digital media that fills it as well as our symbiotic relationship with it. The work, under the guidance of Dr. Michael Musick: Associate Professor of Media Arts, is an evolving project of increasingly complex voice recognition patterns that affords a live actor the opportunity to explore a performance arena of increasing digital complexity in the realm of visual arts. The benefit of UM students viewing and interacting with the computer in a conference setting is that they can experience first hand a voice-activated program that performs with them as opposed to serving them in mundane search tasks, thus demonstrating what future interactions and live performances might resemble in the coming decades