Performance
Improbotics

Improbotics

Tue 27 Feb 2024
Price
€10.00 / Presale (-26y)
€13.00 / Presale
€13.00 / At the door (-26y)
€16.00 / At the door
Spoken language
English
Timetable
19:45 / Doors
Location
Pilar Building
Triomflaan, VUB Entrance 6, 1050 Brussels
Event is archived
Can a robot ever make theatre and if so, what does this non-human theatre look like? Let’s see what Alex – the robot of Improbotics – makes of it.

Although our robot starts off by performing in the show, the Improbotics players take it one step further rather quickly. All performers are wearing an earpiece with which they can receive Alex’s lines directly into their ears. When Alex takes control of the show like an invisible director and starts puppeteering one of the players as a ‘cyborg’, the audience sometimes doesn’t even know who is controlled by artificial intelligence and who is using their own free will to speak.

Improbotics was developed by computer scientists Piotr Mirowski (UK) and Kory Mathewson (Canada). They built an artificially intelligent chatbot based on models of how language works. These models are created by a computer learning on huge amounts of text with 1,5 billion parameters and a dataset of 8 million webpages. This software can create text by predicting words based on all the previously used words. By finetuning these models on the subtitles of more than 100,000 movies, Alex can not only generate words into sentences, but also talk in dialogues.


Bio

ERLNMYR is the business of improviser and doctor in linguistics Ben Verhoeven. During his scientific career he became fascinated with science communication for which he used more and more of his improvisational skills. n June 2018, Ben defended his doctoral thesis and was successfully granted the diploma and title of Doctor in Linguistics.

As part of Pilar ASAP Thu 15 Feb — Fri 15 Mar 2024 The Posthuman Edition Exploring the next chapter of human existence
Special thanks to: Spel: Charlotte De Metsenaere, Gilles Delvaulx, Karen Aerts, Ann Claes, Magali Minet, Alain Rinckhout en Ben Verhoeven (in wisselende bezetting) Regie: Ben Verhoeven Scenografie: Robin Decoster Dramaturgie: Imre Spoor Kostumering: Lotte Cools Illustraties: Koen Van Den Eeckhout Techniek: Jesse Steurs Technologische steun: Thomas Winters en Sebastiaan Jansen Concept: het Improbotics consortium, bestaande uit Kory Mathewson, Piotr Mirowski, Jenny Elfving en Ben Verhoeven
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