Virginia Tech festival puts AI on stage
Wormwood uses large language models to watch dance in real time as the New Music + Technology Festival runs Sept. 14-19.
Virginia Tech’s New Music + Technology Festival runs Sept. 14-19 and opens with “Virginia Tech Faculty and Friends” at 8 p.m. Sept. 14 in the Creativity and Innovation District.
“WORMWOOD, or dances for the demon AI in the organic apocalypse,” is scheduled for Sept. 17-19 at the Sandbox. According to the School of Performing Arts, the work explores the limits and possibilities of artificial intelligence in live dance performance, including the use of large language models in real-time dance observation and analysis. The event page lists the performance as free admission and gives it a running time of 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Cardinal News described the piece as using poetic and literary interpretations of an AI witnessing human movement. It also quoted the production as painting a portrait of a man enthralled to Wormwood, a digital creature-system that blurs the boundaries of machine, friend, oracle and parasite.
Another festival work, “Drosera Obscura,” is set for 8 p.m. Sept. 15 at The Cube in the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. Festival promotion describes it as mixing animatronics with live vocals and recorded sound inside a “speculative posthuman cranberry bog,” with extended reality, spatial sound, scent and touch woven into the experience.
Cardinal News said “Drosera Obscura” is a collaboration between Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology and McGill University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology. The School of Performing Arts describes its animatronics as fully interactive, with “live puppeteering” in which a participant’s movement in VR affects the animatronic’s behavior and vice versa.