Theatre Tech Talks: Artificial Intelligence, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre HowlRound Theatre Commons

In this episode, Emma Bexell from Bombina Bombast, a performing arts company in Malmö, Sweden, takes us to the space of gamified society and theatre. Bombina Bombast combines documentary audio, gaming interface, and immersive installation in a Virtual Reality show where audience members can rest with insomniac Swedish gang members—all while criticizing the attention economy.

Disabled choreographer, dancer, designer, engineer, and founding member of Kinetic Light, Laurel Lawson talks about performing aerially in a wheelchair, accessibility as its own artform rather than an add-on, and their app Audimance which includes haptic interpretation and sensory modulation.

In this episode we talk with the founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, Rubén Polendo, about the hope for the future that inspired Utopian Hotline—now traveling through space as part of the Golden Record. We also discuss the gore, myth, and puppet-robots with their own point of view in Jodorowsky-inspired Santa Sangre.

Annemarie Hagenaars is an astronomer, physicist, and actress. In this playful conversation with Tjaša, Annemarie speculates about Einstein's famous equations, love, and shares her own experiment that she conducted with her one woman show The Story of the Einstein Girl, where she performs the play four different ways and lets the audience choose.

LaJuné shares about the inception of Black Movement Library: a database of motion capture data from Black folks they created, while seeking to avoid the paradigms of erasure, extraction, and exploitation of Black bodies. In their work, they encourage freedom and personal expression over correct data capture. They believe none of us are just numbers, and to treat our movements in our bodies as just data sets is very harmful.

Our guest, Josh Corn, is a true renaissance man. He uses technology to tell absurd and subversive stories about humanity. Josh built René—the most technologically advanced robotic arm from 2002, who had her own circus act. He also made Field Day Games where you can compete with groups over video call to spill, drop, break, crack, ignite, and burn machines in their studio. Everyone wins except Josh. He has to clean up.