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# System prepended metadata

title: Common models of AI + Theater projects

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# Common models of AI + Theater projects

* "Push button to Shakespeare": The most common one out of silicon valley/technical creators.  
    * Generates content, sometimes in response to a prompt. Often falls flat, there's nothing for the user to do, and they can't withstand close reading  
    * Exceptions: twitterbots like `@infinite_scream`, `@MagicRealismBot`, and [Hero and Leander bots](https://ptychomancer.itch.io/hero-and-leander) and other small-snippets-once-a-day bots
* "Interview with an AI" 
    * Take an interesting (or uninteresting) AI and develop it as a character. It is imperfect and fails, but also is **trying** to do something. How would you play the interviewer to extract and highlight its unique personality or problems?
    * [Laughing Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm80NpdztrM) (interacting with **very** inept joke-detector and laughtrack system) 
    * [Hey Robot](https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203463/hey-robot-smart-speaker-alexa-siri-google-assistant-web-free-quarantine) (social game to get your Alexa  to say a word)
    * [AI Dungeon](https://play.aidungeon.io/main/home) Collaborative Machine Learning (GPT2) storyteller
    * [White Collar Crime](https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/) Plays with themes of criminal surveillance but redirects it at financial crimes using the AI tools usually directed at poor communities
* "Impossible Improv" Use the AI to generate a prompt that the user has to read/act/improvise around.  The more impossible the better to virtuosity showcase.
    * Allison Parrish's [poetry readings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc) and [Nonsense Laboratory](https://experiments.withgoogle.com/nonsense-laboratory)
* "Set Designer": the AI is used to generate background or lights or costume or movement for the production, responding to the text or performance. Might be spoken gibberish or projected backdrops. Low risk, not the main focus.
* Scene Painting - Adds to the scene (Willa Barnett)
    * [Sinuous Rills](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbn1aJuarIU)
    * [GiogioCam](https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/giorgio-cam/view/)
* "Junk Sale": The AI generates a bunch of pieces, wackier or less predictably than a human could. Human authors/collaborators/improvisers than pick them up and reuse them in a scene/prouction
    * Most ["AI wrote a script"](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and-its-strangely-moving/) projects are Junk Sale of humans picking up and retailoring interesting AI generated bits. Lying about how much the computer wrote goes [way back](https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-policemans-beard-is-algorithmically-constructed/).
    * [Botnik](https://botnik.org/community.html) is a collective of writers who use algorithmic assistance, but often get written about as "a bot wrote this"
    * Story sifting in Dwarf Fortress

# Theater techniques for Interfaces

**Computers as Theatre**
Brenda Laurel's influential 1991 book (she was a big player in the 1980s VR scene).  Mostly about how theater can influence better UI and experience design than the other way around

**Magic and Software Design, Bruce Tognazinni**
What misdirection and showmanship can bring to computer interface design. By one of Apple's first designers, who is also a stage magician.
https://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html


**Kentucky Route Zero**
Point-and-click adventure with a lot of influence from theatrical productions, most notably set design and blocking, but also how to structure small interactive changes without disrupting flow

# Motion and gestures
Theater, dance, and improv all deal with the body and how it moves through space, and especially how systems moving in space (dance partners, spotlights, scene partners, costumes, puppets) respond to each other.

**Kate's Muppets Talk**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL0K_7AYqxQ
Kate Compton talks about how generative methods can be used to accessorize and accent a body in motion

Mariel Pettee "Dancing with myself"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQqP6NxC5NI
A dancer and physicist trained an autoencoder on her moves, giving her control over how novel or expected the generated moves are. She used that to create a partner that would force her into new paths for her dance.



# Collaborative storytelling

There are a lot of systems that try to generate "narrative", which they define as a sequence of events with causality.  This tends to be unsuccessful, as those events don't tell us anything new about characters or a world.  

**"Cozy Mystery Construction Kit
Prototyping Toward an AI-Assisted Collaborative Storytelling Mystery Game"**
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3337722.3341853?casa_token=BVXXcNPbcXIAAAAA%3AUU06Loo_RdYiXvBK1aD4DprLjPqpp_VB4BLvEtc6-EnnGprlRLgdVC6tbkFHUlwLu4LAHwGn-YUH6M4
A project from my lab at UCSC where we attempted to make a system that modelled characters' values and why they might commit crimes, because in their value system, those crimes were proportional or justified. This let us build up a set of crimes where a small instigation lead to someone being murdered, but the way to "solve" the crime was not to find a stray piece or hair or cigarette, but to understand why someone would have commited the action.

**Imaginarium, Ian Horswill**
One of the first constraint-based generators that strongly prioritized the ability of storytellers to input new information. He also made a system for Dread

# Repetition, re-readings and performance

"There Is No Escape: Theatricality in Hades"
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3472538.3472561
A meditation on the game Hades as a retelling of a story as characters comment and revise it


**Elsinore**
https://elsinore-game.com/
A game as a retelling of Hamlet, but with the main character Ophelia stuck in a time loop. Each three-day loop plays out the events of the court's intrigues, but Ophelia can intervene, sending the action on a different, but perpetually tragic path that reveals more about the systems (suspicion, greed, carelessness, control) that traps these characters.


**Sleep No More**
https://mckittrickhotel.com/sleep-no-more/
The first runaway hit "immersive" play, where masked audience members walk from room to room to see the events of MacBeth unfold. Being present in one room will reveal a character's backstory or motive, but you may miss the events in another room that lead to a later confrontation. Caused many audience members to attend again and again, seeking to exhaustively experience the full network of interactions.

**The Under Presents: the Tempest**
https://tenderclaws.com/theunderpresents
A VR staging of the Tempest. 6 silent participants and 1 live actor are lead through the events, and the participants can gesture and lightly-perform along side the set pieces. Particularly worth reading the "script", which reads like a quest guide for the *performer* to successfuly guide the participants through their actions 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15oI7Py4ELjAG2ZKH8KMgX8BLijgTEunz/view
https://medium.com/alive-in-plasticland/lets-dive-into-the-under-presents-tempest-pt-1-2d1ef2168c5f

Long epistolary, peripheral theater, ARG