{"id":5036,"date":"2023-06-25T14:30:24","date_gmt":"2023-06-25T13:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=5036"},"modified":"2023-06-25T14:32:37","modified_gmt":"2023-06-25T13:32:37","slug":"dsimon-all-presentation-no-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=5036","title":{"rendered":"dSimon: All presentation, no presence<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What\u2019s that meme doing the rounds? Something about how we expected AI to take care of the menial tasks so we could create art, not the other way around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, dSimon<\/em> proves the point. Simon Senn gave an adaption of Chat GPT all his personal information (15,000 emails included) to create an AI alter ego that suggested it be called digital Simon. To cut a technical story short (which Senn and programmer Tammara Leites who joined the show virtually, didn\u2019t do) dSimon essentially suggests performance scenarios, with Senn picking out the ones that seem most interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But before we get to that, which was the most interesting part of the show \u2013 billed as theatre – which actually wasn\u2019t all that interesting, we went through aforementioned technical background lecture and the audience of 17 gathered in the gloom of the Monument\u2019s bowels got given the opportunity to give the GPT suggestions. If you and a couple of mates have ever sat around a laptop and played around with Chat GPT, it was much like that, except the screen is projected and the participants are mostly strangers. It quickly loses its novelty as the paragraphs that get spat out range from the mundane to the bizarre. You know how AI struggles to render human hands? Well, Chat GPT does the same thing with sentences: they\u2019re malformed but because you have an organic brain you can figure out what they\u2019re getting at. It was at this point I dozed off, day drinking<\/a> taking its toll, so have no idea how long this went on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eyes open when the pitch altered. Senn, a likeable character but who mostly fiddles with his laptop, emerges from behind the keyboard to say one idea he selected was to have a man and a woman, naked, with cellphones set to video capture taped over their eyes, with the woman having control of a mechanism that can deliver an electric shock to the man\u2019s leg whenever she presses the button. He invites volunteers to act out this scenario, pointing out he has the equipment ready and there\u2019s a screen behind which they can disrobe. In short order a young man volunteers, but no woman is keen. \u2018Naked? Uh uh.\u2019 This, in hindsight, is the only live theatre, the moment when anything could happen next. It doesn\u2019t. But no worries, he\u2019s foreseen this possibility, and so we watch a recording made of this scenario, the setting an abandoned warehouse. The video promises more than it delivers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We watch another video of Senn in a flotation tank against a backrop of stars, the result of a wellness suggestion spat out by dSimon during Covid lockdown. One moment (literally a moment) of (poor) acting takes place when Senn stands in front of the screen and says something while the image of him is superimposed on his body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, the other entertaining interlude was the power cutting out in the switch from the Monument\u2019s generator back to Eskom power. Suddenly we were back to being in life, not in thrall to ones and zeros.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps there was something conceptual to take home from this plethora of Swiss technological presentation, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s anything we haven\u2019t discussed around the kitchen table. Leites\u2019s face, zoomed large to us, is expressive and attractive, and Senn is likeable and easy-going, but their qualities are subsumed by the digital. The virtual cannot create the beauty of the real. Not yet, possibly never.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

dSimon has it’s last show on 26 June at 8.30pm in the B2 Arena.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s that meme doing the rounds? Something about how we expected AI to take care of the menial tasks so we could create art, not the other way around. Well, … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[1225,577],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5036"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5040,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5036\/revisions\/5040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}