Labyss

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

You have just stepped into the performative installation, Labyss, and are welcomed by a Labyss partner. She is friendly and energetic. As you agree to help Labyss in their quest to save the population’s memories, you soon find yourself in front of an artificial intelligence. The AI asks you questions about your past, and you begin to tell your memories. At first, you are uneasy about sharing such intimate details with a machine, but soon you find that telling your story to someone who listens makes you feel very good. Even though this someone is not human.
In Labyss, the audience is let through a process of recalling, while consenting to become ever more intimate with the software and the company. But what kind of company is this? The audience will fill out questionnaires, watch commercials, be interviewed by an AI, see testimonials from previous customers in Labyss. They will be asked to meditate, share who they are and in the end, they will see their memories as part of the cloud in a spectacular, AI generated stream of memories.

ABOUT THE ALGORITMIC THEATRE

Labyss is created by The Algorithmic Theatre, an inter-disciplinairy artistic research collective exploring how algorithmic technologies and the rise of artificial intelligence affect and shape our lives.
Labyss combines humour and critical thinking in a both ironic and reflective way. We seek to give our audience a direct experience of the tech world’s darkest and strangest habits – such as its habit of creating problems and then seeking to solve these problems using the same technologies and methods, thus creating new problems over and over again. Thereby, we are posing a dilemma for the audience: Will we keep using the very technology that is stealing our data in order to save
ourselves, or are there other ways to meet the future?

Kristian Husted, Text and Direction

Kristian is an author and stage director who works in the cross section of research-based art, activism and documentary fiction. His upcoming novel, My Ukrainian Friend, to be published in Danish later this summer, is a personal story about his friend Ivan who died fighting in the current war in Ukraine.

Kristian Byskov, Text and Direction

Kristian is a visual artist and author, working within stage arts and critical pedagogy. His work is research based with a strong focus on process and collaboration. Currently, Kristian is a PhD candidate at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (Norway) with the project Other Worlds From Here: Seeking to make ways to connect critical science fiction imaginary and storytelling to places affected by ecocide, extraction and land struggle.

Pernille Kragh, Dramaturg

Pernille is a dramaturg, translator and producer educated from the University of Copenhagen. She has worked with classical theatre on award winning theatre productions in Denmark and abroad, as well as with performance art, interdisciplinary art projects and artistic research. Her work is centered around sound, language and text and she combined the two when creating the first festival for audio drama in Denmark.

Tina Ryoon Andersen, Curator of public events

Tina is a curator with an interest in facilitating transdisciplinary collaborations and discursive programs at the cross section of art, technology and society. She is interested in engaging the public in conversations on technology’s influence on society. She also works as Program Manager at IDA – the Danish Society for Engineers, where she currently develops diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. She also works as a consultant for Kulturværftet as part of the EU Digital Deal project.