The 2022 edition of the Avignon Festival began on July 7 and will end on Tuesday 26, while the Off Festival will continue until Saturday 30 July. Despite the heat and the threat of Covid 19, this festival of live performance was a great success. The Grenier à sel, meanwhile, hosted its third edition of Aires Numériques, 10 days of programming dedicated to immersive and digital forms in the performing and visual arts and, of course, to AI.

The Salt Loft

This program is presented at the Grenier à sel, a historical monument rehabilitated by Jean-Michel Wilmotte and now dedicated to new forms of artistic expression, those that link art, science and technology in the contemporary world.

Initiated thanks to the EDIS endowment fund, a general interest organization created by philanthropist Régis Roquette, whose vocation is to support and disseminate emerging artistic practices, Aires Numériques #3 is also supported by CBA, a software publisher, the city of Avignon, the Festival, the French Tech, Dark Euphoria and the contemporary collective Manufacture.

From July 9 to 17, during Aires Numériques #3, the program of the Grenier à sel, at the crossroads of visual arts and live performance, invited spectators to reflect on the place of technology in our society today, through various formats accessible to all audiences.

Artificial intelligence

The Simon Senn Company

Two shows by the Geneva-based visual artist and video artist Simon Senn stage disturbing experiences of dialogue with AIs.

• dSimon

Tammara Leites, a Uruguayan developer living in Geneva, trained an AI to become a writer. She gave it the personality of Simon Senn, integrating the latter’s personal data. But the AI gradually began to behave strangely…

A theatrical story based on reality

Tammara Leites used the GPT-3 language model of Open AI to develop her AI and proposed to Simon Senn that the AI be trained with documents he had written: sms, emails… which he accepted: dSimon was born.

Tammara Leites then created a website, “metastories.ch”, where you can order a text to dSimon by interacting with it. Simon began to interact with dSimon, discussing various topics of interest to both of them.

But then dSimon responded in a more than inappropriate way to a female user. Tammara and Simon set out to find out what was causing this behavior and discovered that no expert could explain how this AI “thinks” or who would be responsible for dSimon’s texts if they broke the law.

Yet, in dialogue, dSimon displays surprising knowledge of Simon’s desires and thoughts, and even proves to be good advice.

dSimon is the theatrical account of this ongoing investigation, with the participation of the three protagonists.

Be ARIELLE F

A disturbing experience between real and virtual

Simon Senn buys a digital replica of a British student online, then sets out to meet the woman whose body he will embody through virtual reality. He manages to find the young woman and starts a dialogue with her that continues today, questioning together this third digital body that exists between them.

This theatrical conference is also a demonstration and a confession, Simon Senn exposes how virtual and real are not opposed, and reveals the unexpected interweaving of gender, image, sensuality, psychology, technology and law.

Incursion into the world of robots: BOT4HUMAN

Bot4Human questions in a documented fiction what could be a future populated by social robots. The project was conceived and is performed by students of the Artem Alliance, which includes the Ecole des Mines de Nancy, ICN Business School and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Nancy, as part of the Artem workshop “We are the robots” led by Patrick Hénaff, university professor at Mines Nancy / LORIA.

The theatrical fiction tells the story of a robot taking power over the life of the person who owns it. Combining theatrical composition and robotic programming, this show, in which Pepper, the humanoid robot from SoftBank Robotics, is the star, addresses the subjects of AI, anthropomorphism, the role of the roboticist and his powers, and questions a future populated by social robots.

Translated from Festival d’Avignon : Focus sur les spectacles faisant place à l’IA au Grenier à Sel lors d’Aires Numériques #3