Live performance on May 24th and May 25th at 7pm
A project by alien productions (Martin Breindl, Norbert Math und Andrea Sodomka) presented by Viertelfestival 2024
The utopian genre is difficult. It seems as if the future has lost everything worth striving for; it has become a place of diffuse fears. What we need are better utopias. And this is where Performing Utopia utilises precisely the technology that, depending on your point of view, either enhances or threatens human intelligence: artificial intelligence.
For the opera, artificial intelligences were trained on historical utopian texts. During the performance, human and artificial voices interact and both perform the resulting machine-generated texts. The music and stage design were also composed with the help of neural networks and interpreted by musicians and artists. And so Performing Utopia is indeed a co-operation between human and artificial perspectives. In the sense of a post-humanist ecology in which only intelligent networks remain viable – regardless of whether humans are involved or not.