ClimateProv: Playing with the?AI

ClimateProv is an interactive 60-minute AI improv theatre performance that provokes conversations about the climate emergency. Human performers work together with an AI performer to improvise live theatrical scenes based on suggestions and prompts related to climate change and its implications for humanity.?

Artists: Blessin Varkey , Gaurav Singh Nijjer , Ranji David , Tajinder Dhami

Supported by: Monica Hirano , Tiz Creel

May 2022. It was the culminating week of the BeFantastic Within Fellowship. Throughout the three weeks of the Fellowship, we explored the interplay of art and artificial intelligence through discussions, skill sharing and guided experiments, leading us to think about how AI might find its way into a live performance. From movement arts and dance to voice and text-based artwork, it was evident that the integration of artificial intelligence into traditional performance formats will conjure up interesting results.

The first written draft of the Climateprov project during the pitching stage where we refined the idea and found collaborators to join the team.

Building blocks come together.

After many rounds of virtual huddles and (optimistic, if not cautious) imagination, the building blocks of Climateprov – improv theatre, generative AI and climate change – started falling into a cohesive structure, even if it was only at a conceptual level. The choice of improvisational theatre as the art form was informed by two reasons: firstly, our personal encounters with conversations about climate change had led us to believe they evoked a sense of helplessness, despair and anxiety amongst those listening; improvisational theatre, the other hand, focuses on humorous, heartfelt and vivid explorations of a subject matter. Secondly, improvisational theatre relies on a series of suggestions from the audience (i.e. an input) to spontaneously create a story (i.e. an output) based on certain improvisational principles and rules (i.e. the parameters). The nature of improv to extrapolate meaning from seemingly disconnected prompts to generate a cohesive narrative is similar to the workings of an AI model.

We began testing some of our ideas through brief playtests and quick experiments. The first of these included training a sample GPT-3 model on the popular ‘Yes, And..’ improv game.

The nature of improv to extrapolate meaning from seemingly disconnected prompts to generate a cohesive narrative is similar to the workings of an AI model.

How does the game work? Human performers — and the AI, in this instance — tell a story together, by starting each successive sentence with a ‘Yes, and…’ and building the narrative further. As you see in the video, the model is first trained on the ‘Yes, and…’ structure through a few rounds of human-generated text and then tasked to generate a response. The positive demonstration was a significant moment for us, as a coherent and responsive interplay between the human performers and the AI was critical for this project.

The diverse artistic and technical backgrounds of our team of six had already allowed us to begin imagining a wide array of possibilities for this project. A few weeks later, we received the news that our pitch had been successful and this project was officially greenlit for development! The question we faced changed from a speculative ‘what is possible?’ to an exciting ‘how to make this possible?’ And thus, we jumped into the next phase of our research where we decided to go back to the three building blocks of the project – improvisational theatre, generative AI and climate change – and take these one step at a time.

For work-in-progress videos and the rest of the process - continue reading here