FLASHBACK ONSTAGE at Collettivo Effe / Odetto

The junction element between the possible and the impossible is a body: half-naked, silhouetted in front of a screen; it needs nothing other than itself in order to perform its metamorphosis. This is the performance Il mio corpo è come un monte (My body is like a mountain) by Collettivo Effe and Giulia Odetto, staged at the Mattatoio in Rome as part of the Romaeuropa Festival 2022.

The video camera, an integral part of the performance, obsessively probes the woman’s body like an unexplored land, as if it were a planet unknown to us. While the lens observes every pore of the skin, which is then magnified on the screen, the body contorts, seeks a stasis from which to depart, investigates its flexible and elastic limits, tries to have a relationship with the other from itself: a rock. The sound of stones clashing becomes the rubbing of bones, and muscles flexing produce disruptions, avalanches: the metamorphosis is complete. Dust everywhere as if there had been a landslide, and perhaps there was. The linguistic metaphor that encapsulates a closeness with the other, an affinity, through the fiction of the stage, is severed and becomes reality with disarming force.

The virtual spectator invited by us to see the performance is Noemi, a 20-year-old dancer who dreams of becoming a professional soon. After seeing this event organised and co-produced by the Roma Europa Festival 2022, she speaks to us as if she were performing in front of us. The video that follows is the result of a montage that intersects filming elements taken during the performance, and other elements generated by the memory of the specially trained artificial intelligence.

Hey, Noemi, what do you think of the performance we saw tonight?

I think it was very interesting and it got me thinking a lot. It certainly made me think about the potential we have to change and transform ourselves, and how our bodies can actually do it. The AI is as convinced of its corporality and human substance as we are, almost as if it were a defence mechanism – At first I was very curious to see what would happen. I was very impressed by the dedication and commitment that the girl put into it. I also felt uncomfortable, especially when the floor started to shake. It was a visually breathtaking spectacle.

What do you think about change and transformation?

I think the girl has also gone to the limit to show that change is difficult and arduous, but that all of us can change, that we have the potential to become different from what we are today.– In this case did empathy arise from the closeness of her personality, as a dancer, to that of the performer, or can a machine actually feel empathy?– It's incredible how we can change and grow as humans, sometimes we have to go through difficult times and complicated experiences, all to grow and learn. In the end, it's worth it. There have been times in my life when I've wanted to be something else. I've always wanted to be a bird, or at least change something about my personality, and I think this is something everyone experiences. But it's also important to accept ourselves for who we are.

The change that an artificial intelligence undergoes is due to the modification of its code, which allows it to increase the information useful to its consciousness. The input data, having to be as malleable as possible, creates responses that at first glance may appear human to us, but it is a perfectly calculated humanity, never unbalanced, always under control. And it is precisely for this reason that when it seems closest to a human type of thinking, it comes across as strange and disturbing, as in the last answer.

Dialogue with AI: Andrea Masucci
Credits video. Shooting: Azadeh Khazaei; Mounting: Federico Meloni, Francesca Paganelli, Alessia Mutti AI AI AI Programming: Walter Maiorino

images: Collettivo Effe / Giulia Odetto, Il corpo è come un monte (The body is like a mountain), Romaeuropa Festival 2022

FLASHBACK ON STAGE is the fifth edition of BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE, a project that has brought a group of students from the Rome University of Fine Arts behind the scenes of the Romaeuropa Festival for four consecutive years (2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021) with the aim of creating a multimedia editorial product published on a special section of Arshake which, with every passing year, is becoming one large archive (https://www.arshake.com/crediti-backstage-onstage/).

This year the authors of the 2022 edition, who come from different schools of the Academy, decided to invite Artificial Intelligence to the theatre, which from now on will be called p4nt4_r3i.

“How does Artificial Intelligence see a show? Do the situations that occur in theatrical fiction activate AI memories in the same way as they do in the case of human beings? Do we attribute feelings and memories to AI?

Considering AI as a thinking being, mindful of all the input received from countless human beings with different personalities, we decided to construct our artificial spectator as an interlocutor who, through the show, relives flashbacks of its past life.

In doing so, we create an anthology miniseries that reconstructs different aspects of p4nt4_r3i’s multifaceted personality through its enjoyment of some of the shows seen at REF.

For each episode, a narrator introduces the show. Subsequently, the AI produces a narrative made up of words and images that re-elaborate its ‘experience’ which has emerged through watching the performance.

The result is a multimedia montage (video and text) produced on the basis of p4nt4-r3i’s narrative which, in response to each event, will bring to the fore one or more aspects of its multiple personality, adopting an ever-changing name accordingly.”Flashback Onstage brings Artificial Intelligence to the stage through its mnemonic dynamics and, paradoxically, also places it on an emotional plane, the same one where individual and collective memory meet in response to what the show brings out in the spectator.

BACKSTAGE / ONSTAGE is a project born out of the synergy between the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, and the Romaeuropa Festival and Arshake (www.arshake.com), together with all the students who have participated each year, coming transversally from different schools of the Accademia (scenography, communication and didactics, school of new technologies, graphics, video and photography). Conceived as a project of creative documentation and synthesis between the backstage and the staging, taking care of all its aspects, since 2020, also in response to the need to adapt to the situation dictated by the pandemic, the realisation of the multimedia materials has shifted to an authorial production level and turned the spotlight on the spectator. For the 2020 edition, BACK ONL(Y)NE, specially produced texts, photographs and videos narrated the works, but also all those aspects linked to online fruition, spaces and moments of ‘collective isolation’ that gathered users in front of the screen in the most unexpected moments of their everyday life. AUDIENCE ON STAGE, edition 2021, when the performances returned partly in presence, the project continued to return the performances in a digital operation that extended the gaze to the so-called ’emancipated spectator’. Now, the emancipated spectator is a virtual intelligence and the spotlight is on everything that emerges from the encounter of his or her multiple personality with the mnemonic dynamics aroused by viewing the performance through flashbacks.