Moving Forward with EMC
Co-founders Al Heartley, Tiffany Vega, and Leandro Zaneti gather to discuss current topics facing non-profit arts leaders and organizations.
Moving Forward with EMC
When Theater Meets AI: Boundaries and Breakthroughs with Kevin Laibson
Leandro sits down with Kevin Laibson, a director, producer, and educator working at the edge of live performance and emerging tech, to draw bright, useful lines between AI, VR, and the human heart of theater.
Kevin traces the path from cheap, scrappy stages to virtual spaces where physics is optional and paper tech becomes a live demo. He explains why virtual rehearsals can cut late surprises, how actors walking first-day sets in VR changes design conversations, and what the Royal Shakespeare Company learned prototyping spatial tools for real rehearsal rooms. Then we press into the hard question: should theater keep AI out of the art?
If you’re hungry for a human-first roadmap where VR strengthens rehearsal and documentation, AI automates the boring bits, and the stage stays gloriously alive—this one’s for you. Listen, share with a colleague, and tell us: where do you draw the line between tool and co-author? Subscribe, leave a review, and join the conversation at emcforward.com.
Hello and welcome back to Moving Forward with Evolution Management Consultants. I'm Leandro Zanetti, one of the co-founders of EMC. And if you've listened before, you already know what it means when I'm behind the mic. It's time for another AI episode. Now, those of you who follow my ongoing musings on AI know I've been a pretty steady advocate for using it behind the scenes in the administration and the operations of theater. But I've also been pretty vocal about the fact that we keep it out of the art form itself. Well, today I'm going to complicate that just a little bit. My guest is someone who I've known for years, I think over a decade at this point. He's a director, producer, and educator working at the intersection of live performance and emerging technology. So something tells me that we may not see eye to eye on my hard and fast rules. I cannot wait to get into it. It is my pleasure to introduce Kevin Labson to the pod. Kevin, hi.
SPEAKER_00:Hi, it's so nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I can't wait to disagree about stuff.
SPEAKER_04:Yes, me too. I love disagreements. Um can you believe we've known each other for over a decade? We met when you were when you were at Magic Future Box, the artistic director. I was stage manager for that Pericles adaptation, Ocean Kingdom.
SPEAKER_00:I was trying to remember what the project was, but you were uh such a dream to work with. I never forgot. Uh and then we again uh we crossed paths at the public.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, right. When you were at the public at the mobile unit, um, I was I was Ruth's assistant at that point. Right. Um uh yeah, but I'd come out of the producing department just a little while before that. So uh yeah, we've crossed paths in many, many ways. And since then, I feel like you've had like fixed careers, Kevin. You've had such a unique sort of career path to what you do now. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you've done in theater and all that?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So yes, I should have been better prepared for that question. I um, like you said, I was a director um and producer. Um I was the artistic director, uh co-artistic director of Magic Future Box. I was the artistic director for a small company called Full Circle. I was the uh I was the artistic director of the People's Improv Theater for several years um and uh an interim at the Jersey City Children's Theater. So I was doing the like artistic director thing and occasionally doing some freelance producing. Um I ended up when I left the pit, I think I was I had oh no, it was while I was still at the pit. In fact, I had maybe just gotten that job. Um I no, that's not. Hold on, let me try this again. I was still at the pit, that is true. And I had just gotten hired uh at Atlantic Acting School to teach improvisation, um, which I'm still doing. Love it there, love those people. Shout out to Atlantic. Um and I got an email from I had posted on Facebook, as you did back in the day, um, that I had gotten this job at Atlantic, and I got an email from a woman I went to high school with, a very talented, very imaginative uh VR director named Kira Benzing. And we had done theater together in high school, and she reached out and said, Hey, I'm working on this uh cool weird VR thing. They want us to do some improvisation stuff. Do you think any of your students would be interested in participating in something like that? And I was like, Well, I it's too early for me to give a shit about my students, uh, but I will come for sure because this sounds cool as hell. Let me come and let me bring my weird friends. Um, and so I was brought onto this project called Alive in Plastic Land that was doing some or was trying to figure out how to do some live improvisational shows uh on a now defunct social VR platform called High Fidelity. Um, and we did a couple of shows, uh a handful of shows and a couple of workshops. Um, and I co-directed, I ended up co-directing with Kira. That's where I met Alex Coulomb, who runs the company that I now work for called Agile Lens, and a frequent collaborator and uh co-author of my recent AI paper that I imagine we'll talk about, uh, David Goshfeld. We all met on this project. Um and I've told this story more than a couple of times, so forgive me, but um I we were deep into the rehearsal process. We were a couple of weeks out from doing the show, and they the High Fidelity had sent one of their developers to like work with us and you know help us figure out how to solve whatever problems we were going to have to solve in bringing this performance into VR. And I was just like on a lunch break, and he came up to me and he was like, Hey, do you have a second? We're gonna build your theater, and I just wanted to get like your input on what you needed. And I was like, You're gonna what my what? Um, and I kind of never looked back. Like honestly, uh, I came to understand that working in game engines is almost exactly like working in black box theater, except you're not restricted by physics. Um and so as a person who is largely made sort of non-traditional work and a lot of sort of uh cheap work, um, and trying to solve for how do you make cheap look purposeful, not how do you make cheap look expensive. Um all of these same things apply to working in game engines and mixed reality. And as such, I was like, oh, well, this is this is just so exciting and so freeing. Um, and you know, from the ability to fly or resize or deal with different kinds of gravity, um, time loops, all of these things that suddenly you could bring into live performance. It was like, well, what why would I ever want to work back in New York when I could work internationally doing magic, basically?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so yeah, that's uh that's that's how I moved into mixed reality. Um and it's been, yeah, I mean, it's been cool as hell.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that's that's so interesting. I um the VR bug is also something that bit me when I was in when I was in grad school, we had access to the creative arts center that had all of this technology available to us. And I spent countless hours playing just within the VR space, total noob, right? I took this class that was all about artistic process, and I met somebody there who was working within technology and the intersection of technology and painting, who built all of these worlds that you could and sculpture that you could then sit into. Like there was one where she um essentially mapped bodies that you saw in VR to benches that were in real space, and you could sit in them and um listen to their thoughts if you align your head with their head in VR space. Um, and so she introduced me to uh this to the world in VR, and she essentially was like, here's the machine, here's how you turn it on, and then left me alone in this black void, um, which then just led me to I, you know, I'm a dancer in a previous life. Uh I was a dancer all through college and still enjoy just like dabbling. And so it uh what I spent time doing was figuring out the intersection between movement, mark, and digital technology. So I can understand all that to say I understand how like the VR bug gets in you, and you're like, wait, so much more is possible, and I can do it from anywhere. Um I feel like that get that gave you like that means that you had a very different experience from other artists during COVID. Like, what was COVID like for you as in in this intersection? Just to take a slight tangent here. I'm curious, like, what was that like?
SPEAKER_00:That's a no, absolutely, that's exactly right. It was a very different experience than other people, um, in part because we had already been doing theater that was accessible from home. Um, and so some of the transition of like, oh, how do I make stuff that it doesn't require going to a place or doesn't require uh co-location, some of that we had already sort of swallowed. Um but uh I mean the truth is adoption for VR is still incredibly low. And uh which I think something we say all the time at work is like we're just making shows for people who aren't born yet, and we love that. Um, but all to say, you know, we took on an I took on a bunch of different projects in the pandemic, um, and um didn't feel at all like I was compromising or like I was trying to figure out a new thing to do that wouldn't later apply to the work that I was doing. Ended up publishing our first Sigraph paper working on a project for um in uh Mozilla Hubs, which is also now defunct, um, that was can we do an entire sort of indie theater production process entirely in virtual reality? So all of our pre-production meetings, all of our rehearsals, performances, and everything was all handled through hubs. Um, but other than that, it was an entirely very traditional um process. Um that was called Jettison by a guy named Brendan Bradley, who's a really wonderful writer and actor. Um, and that was it was really uh, I mean, I think there are you can count on your hand, you know, on two hands, probably the number of artists that made work during COVID that they then went on to be like, and that was directly relevant to every other project I've worked on since. And so, in some ways, um, I felt very well positioned and very lucky uh to have something figured out by the time we were all stuck at home.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, interesting. Um, and the idea of doing a production meeting in virtual space is quite interesting. Does it involve av like are you are you in avatars within avatars within the virtual reality space in that case?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and um, you know, all of the same, I mean, something we talk about all the time is that like paper techs are just better in virtual reality because you can do live real-time demonstration, uh, either tabletop sized or in what would be, you know, to scale or whatever, because you have everything accessible to you that you would in production. It's just in a different context or it's half-built or whatever. And so we learned quite a lot about production process and production meetings, specifically, what is and isn't useful in terms of leaning into full production and our whole, I mean, we just finished up. Forgive me, I feel like I'm going immediately on lots of tangents, but we just finished up a year-long grant with uh project with the XR Network Plus and the Royal Shakespeare Company prototyping a bunch of tools that would fit neatly into a standard production process that would allow for virtual reality and spatial computing um to be more accessible throughout rehearsal as a means for, for instance, designers to be able to come to rehearsals without having to, you know, jet between three different countries in Europe for the three different shows that they're working on and bringing uh basically everything that everything that gets delayed by, well, we'll figure this out once we move to the space, can largely be replicated or simulated ahead of time in VR, bringing actors onto the stage in a in a virtual way. Something we did um with their production of Edward II was put them into a virtual model box. So they were all able actors on the first day of rehearsal, were able to physically walk through the set. Um, and again, all of this is to say like rehearsal and production is you know thousands of years old. And also there are lots of things that we take for granted, problems that we take for granted that we can start to solve with the power of spatial computing, a phrase that I hope I never say out loud again. That sounds awful. Power of spatial computing.
SPEAKER_04:Um well, but I but you're you're blowing my mind right now. Um, mostly because you know, we'll we'll get into this conversation around AI in the art or out of the art. Right. Um but as our way into that, you you're working on a project right now that is is um that obviously uses AR in the Harmth. Um, and I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit more about the pro that project you're working on.
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So the Harmph is a it's an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Harmfulness of Tobacco, um, which is a short play. Do you know it?
SPEAKER_04:I don't.
SPEAKER_00:Um bear with me. I'm just gonna give you the pitch. I love it. All right. So the harmfulness of tobacco is a 15-minute uh lecture play. And ostensibly, you are there, you the audience, are there to see a lecture on the harms of tobacco. But the guy giving the lecture is just so happy to be out of the house, away from his annoying family uh and among people, uh, that he just spends the 15 minutes of the lecture complaining about everything else. And by the end of it, he basically says, Oh, and I see my wife is here. Uh so as soon as she comes in, everybody just like clap, just pretend that this was really great and that we talked about a lot. Okay, and thank you so much for listening to my lecture. Um, which I read this play when I was like 13 years old, and it blew my mind because I did not know you could do that. It's you know, it's a bit of a practical joke on the audience, which I think is magnificent. You sort of you sort of sign up to be to go see a play, and then you find out that you are diegetically in the play as an audience, and then you find out that the play is never gonna deliver the thing that the play says it's going to deliver. And I just think that's magnificent. Uh, it's such a like little stinker move of Chekhov. Um, and I've always wanted to put it up, but the truth is, it is fundamentally a play about like a middle-aged guy complaining about his wife. And like by the time I was old enough to produce, I was also old enough to realize that like that doesn't, we don't really need to see more of those plays. Like, that doesn't really have a place. Uh, and so I just sort of wrote it off as like, well, that's a play that I really like and doesn't have any place in the cultural conversation, um, except as like a museum piece. Um, and then I was sent a link to uh like an advertisement for a new at the time, this was 2019, I think this was sent to me, a new software, Gen AI software called Synthesia. And synthesia is basically text to video generation, and it's like it creates talking head videos. Um, and it's ostensibly for like training videos and really anything that you need, like somebody from the waist up in front of a green screen or whatever else. Um, HR videos, stuff like that. And it was like I said, it was 2019, so the tech was bad. Um, I mean, it was amazing. What it was able to do was amazing. Um, and they take um, I think they take actually like real humans uh who deliver, I forget what the word is, but like a series of sentences that uh create all of the various uh phonemes that you'd use. And then they have their algorithm that translates again very basic synthetic speech into very pretty good and effective video uh of these people. You can choose your sort of choose your guy. Um but again, and I know I've said this, I can't overstate it was 2019, and it was just so awful. It was so uncanny valley. Um, and and again, no disrespect to synthesia, they've made incredible software, and I think it's improved quite a lot, but it really was just like this is the most inhuman thing. And the ad itself was like, Who wants to bother with actors? And I was like, what is this? Is such a nightmarish, like uh just resentful to humanity, just desperately bad. And I immediately I was like, I gotta make some art with this. Like, of course, I want to make art with this. Um, because this is something that I've been doing for a while is taking really good software and making really dumb stuff with it. I think that's like a big hobby of mine. Um so uh, you know, Beat Saber, have you played Beat Saber? No, oh it's a it's I really just assumed that you had, and this is gonna be too tangential, I think. But Beatsaber is basically uh, it's like a almost a workout video game. You have two lightsabers and they're things coming at you, it's a rhythm game and you psych at them as music plays. And I uh when I figured out how to create your own levels, I was like, what if we just did the whole score of Heather's the musical as like a conductor? Uh and it was like this is the worst use of this software. Anyway, point of the story is I saw synthesia, I was so offended by it that I was like, I gotta make some art. This felt to me like the perfect opportunity to do harmfulness of tobacco because I was by by the time I decided I was gonna do this, we had just gotten into lockdown. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna spend any money and I'm not gonna bring other people in, and this is only a waste of my time. Uh so as far as like producing something that has no real cultural value, if I'm not really making it for an audience and I'm just doing it as an experiment, I think this is this is the moment for me to do harmfulness. So I gave myself a 29-hour workshop uh where I would go wake up every day and I'd go into the studio and I would work with this computer. And I figured if I was going to be working with a digital actor, I might as well also work with synthetic collaborators in every other department. And so I was using like first generation runway and first generation mid-journey as my design team. I trained my own uh GPT, I think it was the using the weights of GPT-2 at the time, um, using text from like Viola Sbolan and Peter Brooke and Link Later, and like just every theatrical text that I thought might be relevant. And I took that on as my sort of quote unquote assistant director. Um, and so it was just me and like seven or eight different AI systems, if you will. And we set out to make the harmfulness of tobacco in 29 hours, and it was garbage, man. It was just totally everything about it was terrible. The experience was terrible. I ended up working as like middle manager between these various synthetic systems, and um, I just hated it. And I can't recommend against doing something as stupid as that uh hard enough. But I am mouthy and I do want people to know what I'm working on. And so I had posted a fair amount about doing this, and by that time I had some reputation as a person who makes stuff, uh, especially in like, you know, uh performance technology. And so I got reached out to by a couple of universities and a couple of other institutions saying, like, hey, heard you were working on this thing. If you're interested in giving a talk, you know, everybody's desperate for programming because it's COVID. Um, we would love to have you, we'd love to, if you can present the work, we'd love to have you give a talk about it. But I didn't want to do that because the work was unshowable. I mean, truly just like so bad. Um describe bad for us, Kevin. Like, what does what does bad mean in this content? I it it was uncomfortable to watch, it was awkward, the timing was terrible. Uh, the computer can't act, the computer still can't act, but the computer at the time couldn't act uh like it somehow could act worse. Um, nothing about it, it it was. I mean, it truly, if you imagine what it would be like to train an animatronic to do a one-man show without the use of a human being to give it a voice in the first place, and then like multiply that exponentially by a negative amount in terms of how much entertainment value it was boring. Um it was uh it was awkward, it was uncomfortable to watch. I can't, I really really bad. Um, I can send you a clip.
SPEAKER_04:Uh I'd love that. I'd love that.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe we'll drop one in. Right, perfect. So I so I didn't want to show it, and I didn't really want to talk about it because I'm not a hater of technology by any stretch, obviously. And I didn't think that this was representative of like what can be done when people are collaborating with artificial intelligence. This was really, I gave myself a very strict set of parameters, both in terms of timing and what I was willing to do. And I, you know, at the time I had a sort of mission to only ever work with consumer available software or software that I built myself. And so there were even then, there were systems I could be using that were more expensive or more complex that would have gotten something a little better. And I didn't want to come out and say, like, well, this was very bad. And so I want you all to know that everything is going to be very bad forever in a time when everybody was like, is this the shape of our lives? Um, so it occurred to me that what I was being asked to do was come to give a talk about a topic uh that I didn't really want to talk about. And that was an adaptation of The Harmfulness of Tobacco. So I could do what I thought was the funniest possible thing, which was agree to come and give a talk about collaborating with AI and then come and talk about everything else for a solid 15 minutes and then wrap it up by being like, oh gosh, I'm so sorry I didn't realize your time is up. Thanks so much. Let them know that this was so useful. Um, and that was the sort of first version is I gave a talk. I gave quote unquote gave a talk uh where really I just kind of talked about the the problems of AI broadly, um, without specifically going into here's what my process was and all the things that they really expected and and frankly wanted from the talk. Uh and so that brief you know series of talks has now turned into a 70-minute lecture about this product or process, except that I never talk about that. I talk very directly about why we as artists need not fear artificial intelligence, though we as human beings absolutely should. And ultimately it's a show about like neurodivergence and distractability and the ways in which we disconnect and alienate ourselves under the guise of technology that is there to connect and replicating computers replicating a world that they don't actually occupy. And you know, I talk about a lot of stuff. So that is the the harm. I'm sorry, that was probably 25 minutes just of an elevator pitch.
SPEAKER_04:No, and um, you you just announced that it's coming to New York.
SPEAKER_00:Do you yes, we're doing three dates uh at caveat um in November and January and February, and then actually a brand new news. Uh, we've been asked by the Elysian in LA to bring the show. Awesome. Congratulations for that for 2026. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04:That's awesome. And I think also just an interesting way that folks might be uh introduced to this concept of AI and art by going to this um project that integrates that into the very product, which brings me to I think the like core question I have and the thing I want to talk to you about, which is so like you heard me say in the intro, I've been a pretty strong uh I've been pretty strongly saying, let's keep it out of the art. I want to protect the humanness of what we do. And my my real point here is that as I see so many art forms sort of be absorbed into what is artificial intelligence, um, it strikes me that folks who do who make theater have a unique position where they could be the last bastion of human-made theater, of things that are purely human, that are not um uh, I mean, they are influenced to the extent that society is influenced, but the art making itself remains human output exclusive. And um, you know, I think that there's an opportunity for us to have a competitive advantage against all of these other art forms that have historically taken market share, if you will, away from us, right? People going to the movies takes away from people going to theater, TV did it further, radio did it first, right? So all these things that now are, because they're digital, are able to be manipulated in ways we may not even know by artificial intelligence. Um, there is a there there is perhaps the opportunity for trust building with our audiences that can't trust the sort of reliability or fealty of any of the other art forms anymore. Um I'm curious. So that's my that's that's sort of where I've been coming from in as to why not AI. What uh what's your response? Like what's your response to that?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, unfortunately, I entirely agree with everything you've said. I I don't I don't have any pushback to any of that, except that the world as it moves forward finds ways to integrate technology. Um I don't think that the conversations around AI will remain as present as they are right now. I think right now is an incredibly fervent time for people to be talking about AI because, first of all, we've done this unfortunate thing of labeling, giving AI this like blanket definition that covers an enormous amount of different technologies. Um, and I think as soon as people start to really understand what these technologies are, we'll have a more nuanced understanding of what it does and does not do and can and cannot do, and all these things. But all of this is to say I think it's interesting that you think of theater as a place that can remain so exclusively human when like theater has always been this testing ground for technology. I mean, from electric lights to projection screens or uh overhead projectors, like these are all theatrical innovations. And I think I don't think there's ever going to be a world where everybody is in a VR headset during uh an entire rehearsal process unless they are entirely remote and doing an experiment. Um or, you know, I mean, look, I do think there's obviously I think there's a place for VR theater, but that is a totally different, frankly, totally different medium. I think that people have always wanted to gather. I think that people will continue to want to gather. I think that what generative AI will do in the theater is as yet undiscovered. I don't think that it will replace anything, the way that it will start to replace processes and even product in film or television, for instance. Um I don't think we're ever going to get to a place where AIs can or AI synthetic actors can fool anyone. Um I don't think we're going to get to a place where uh humanoid robots can fool anyone, but I do think we're going to get to a place where these technologies, as they exist in our lives, start to exist in the work that we make about our lives. Um and I don't see a world where I mean, I think we're I mean we already had a play on Broadway with a with a meta-human version of Robert Downey Jr., right? And that wasn't AI, that's like a very programmed, um game engine-focused product. Um, but I don't know if you've seen the ABBA Voyage in London. I mean, top 10 shows I've ever seen in my life. Uh, and in part, it's because there's a live band, in no small part. If there wasn't a a live band in that show, I don't think it would be nearly as successful. But I don't think that the holograms are taking away from the liveness of it. I think the liveness of things comes from crowds. I think that the liveness of entertainment has long been about a bunch of us are watching this thing rather than a bunch of us are excited that this thing is happening in real time.
SPEAKER_04:Hmm. Well, and and I think that um what's what's interesting, even in in what you were saying earlier in our conversation, that that does start to maybe soften my edges is that it doesn't, that it isn't an all or nothing, right? That there are elements of the production process that might be benefited by something like AI. But but I guess the underlying all of this is the question of whether or not you see AI as a tool or a partner, right? Because I think even in in what you said, when we talk about lighting or sound or um any of the sort of technological innovations, automation, right? Um, and then you have the technologies that are not even uh tech uh technology in the way we understand it, like illusion, right? Illusion is a technology of feeder. Um and so I I I totally understand the point about us being the sort of play space for it, but that hinges on an understanding of AI as tool, which you know, if you read a lot in my readings about AI, like that's the fundamental misgiving about AI is that it is no longer just a tool, it is something that sort of partners with us and creates. And so, where's your take on like is AI AI as a tool or AI as co-creator?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I my my my glib answer to this is it's a tool, full stop. It's a tool. If it's your if you're using it as a creative partner, you're a hack. You're a hack and you're a baby and you're an idiot and you have no business making art. Um that said, the the real answer is like I'm an improviser first and foremost. And my and I improvise largely with people, mostly with people, but I can. Consider all of the work that I make, even by myself with various technologies, to be fundamentally improvisational. And that's not if I am if I am bad at using a cirksaw, and then all of my work is jagged and splintery, then I have every right as an artist to say, I think that this is my medium. I think I make jagged and splintery work. And in that way, the cirk saw, which is very deliberately a tool, does become a collaborator or a partner. But it's not really the cirksaw, it's my own inability to function with one. Um, or if I'm only good at one specific technique and I make that technique my entire oeuvre. I don't know how to say that word, but I've seen it written down a lot. Um, then I that's my own limitation with which I am improvising or with which I am collaborating. And that is being channeled through this tool. Um you can't be a photographer and not think of your camera as a partner to some extent. I but again, I think like, you know, there's that um, oh God, what is his name? The writer of uh The Wire was interviewed David something, David Simon? It doesn't matter. Uh your listeners can look it up. Yeah um and somebody says, and I'm paraphrasing the quote is much better, but the interviewer says basically, what do you think about these, you know, language models or this, these AI tools? He probably says, uh, would you use them? And he was like, Absolutely not, under no circumstances. He's like, but aren't you tempted, if you're having a hard time transitioning from one scene to another, wouldn't you be tempted to like throw this into a language model and see get some suggestions? And he he says, I would rather put a gun in my mouth. It's because he's a writer and like writing is what he likes to do. And if he uses a generative tool to get himself out of the hole, I don't think that makes him less of a writer, but I am less interested in that specific moment if he leaves it as is. And something I say in the Harmf very directly is like, if there are synthetic moments in your work, great, you can have you can use synthetic moments in your process, that's fine. But if your process is synthetic, it's no longer your work. If the if the keyboard is playing itself, then you never made it in the first place. Um, and I wouldn't be interested in that because I'm not interested in art that isn't speaking to my experience as a human being.
SPEAKER_04:Hmm. And so even as in in creating something like the Harmth, um, the writing and narrative of it is exclusively you. You keep so you even within your practice have boundaries that you've set for where you allow AI into your artistic process. I'm wondering how if you could talk a little bit about like what those might be and how you came up with what those boundaries are for yourself as an artist.
SPEAKER_00:That's a really interesting question. Something I say a lot, and this is a hill I will die on, is like the real challenge, specifically with LLMs, but arguably with any generative AI software, the challenge is that the people that are using them do not understand how they work. Um, and I genuinely believe this is the hill. You need to have a license in order to be implementing these tools. I think like a gun or a car, you should need to understand what's going on in the mechanics of the thing if you're going to be operating the thing. Um I don't immediately have like a sort of taxonomy of ways in which I will or won't use AI. Um, but I can say, you know, a lot of my work is writing, and I can say like I'm just not interested in statistical probabilities when it comes to language. Um, you know where I'll use that is like writing a bio. I hate writing my bio. So I will definitely continue to let ChatGPT write my bios, and then I will go back and edit them. But like I don't need to do the first draft of a bio. I've done a thousand of them in my life. Um but that doesn't feel like art. That feels like uh this is the kind of work that you write and nobody reads. Do you know what I mean? Um when it comes to expression, I can't rely on statistical probability any more than I could. Um I don't know where the rest of that sentence was. I have a I have a friend who's a filmmaker, and she just finished her first short or just premiered her first short, and they asked her about writing this uh piece, which is pretty um abstract. And uh she and her writing partner wrote this piece by drawing tarot cards. And they drew, I guess, at you know, 10 cards, and they then, using those as inspiration, crafted a story that I think is really cohesive and fascinating. Um, but it also makes sense that they took it not from here is the story we want to tell, but rather let's find out what kind of story we want to tell when we are inspired by these icons. And so that is the, I mean, that's the exact same as using an LLM. You are literally just drawing cards. And the the LLM is gonna be less interesting because the odds are in the favor of sounding human, and sounding human means sounding like the median uh collective voice of every bit of writing that's been accessed by this thing, and so it's just gonna be tropes and uh you know middling work. Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know if that answers your question.
SPEAKER_04:No, I think I I I think it does, and and um, I think that one of the things that is striking me is that it it's about the line also of what we consider as being the creation of work, right? You as a writer are not gonna ask GPT to write your script for you. That is what you do, right? But um, we as theater makers are in an innately uh collaborative art form, right? And so um I think one of the dangers that that I see is uh is is less so maybe for playwrights and more so for like designers, right? Designers where suddenly a director doesn't have to do the messy work of collaboration, of explaining vision, of of having to do all of that. Um, and and even actors. You talked about your your paper on on working with AI actors, and and there seems to be, at least in our conversation today, like it won't necessarily not letting it sort of drive your art practice as a writer, but I'm curious when you get into the directing of it or the where are do those boundaries become a little bit more permeable in working with other artists? Um, and and uh I I guess that's where my fear is is that suddenly you get like, I'm thinking of Richard Foreman right now, right? Who like notoriously wanted every element to be within his control. He told actors how to say the lines, he told the designers how what exactly what he wanted. He was the director and the designer on a lot of things, and it just um has perhaps the the ability to and opens the door for the consolidation of the art form to become one from one as opposed to from many. Um but and it seems like you've integrated into that work. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about you know, work collaborating with something like an AI actor and um what that uh where you stand on that sort of like integration of um uh of AI into the process of theater making at large.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this is very interesting. I mean, I think Foreman is a really interesting reference point because Foreman, regardless of how you feel about his work, was brilliant. Um and when you hand when you when you hand a theater over to Richard Foreman, you get something that Richard Foreman has made through and through, and you want that because it's Richard Foreman. And if Richard Foreman is unable to, I almost feel bad even saying his name in this sentence, if an auteur is unable to create work by themselves without using generative AI in order to do so, I would be wildly suspect of the talent or skill of that person. Because again, what you are getting when you're asking these computers to generate things is the is somebody else's idea of what everybody else's idea is. And I think the bigger dangers are rather than should I not be collaborating with this thing that is fundamentally just a rock that knows how to do math, I think the the challenge is like, should I be collaborating with this thing whose algorithms were weighted by people who have maybe never seen the kind of work that I care about? Um, you know, and you see designers have started to use generative AI for brainstorming and all these things. And fundamentally, what happened within six months is every designer that was working with this stuff that was mandated to work with this stuff was like, it's coming back with the most generic, boring ideas, um, except for the occasional crazy misfire. And then that crazy misfire is not like I am 3D printing it and putting it out. I'm looking at it, I'm going, what's exciting about this mistake that this thing has made? And how does that mistake, why, what is happening in me that is uh, you know, emblazoned by this mistake? And how do I access that? How do I heighten that? What can I build based on how I felt when this computer fucked something up? And so I just don't think sincerely, I think the dangers have less to do with will people stop hiring other people, and have more to do with will vanity projects become easier to make. But that's more of a that's a capitalist problem more than anything else. And I mean, we've all seen projects, so many projects that go up in big off-Broadway houses, quote unquote off-Broadway, or actually legitimate off-Broadway, where you're like, this is just somebody who had a lot of money.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Uh and I don't think that that's I don't think that's new or going to be uh, you know, gotten much worse by by the use of AI. I think that you can smell that stuff a mile away if you have any talent or discerning ability.
SPEAKER_04:Well, and it it brings up this question of the creativity of AI, right? Because they are large language models, they are pr they are prediction machines. And the most uh the most exciting creative moments are when things subvert your expectation, right? So there is a tension right now, at least, between the AI that we have and the very form of art making. But that gets complicated when you get into things like um AGI, right? Uh or or um and when you start to allow, or once we get to that threshold, which you know, we it might be next year, it might be 10 years, depending on who you ask. Uh, but but right now, certainly it it's a marker of the limitation of the technology, but a limitation that at least from from the you know the the slice of AI that I keep up with is not that far off. Um and I still think, and still I believe that the work created by humans will innately be better because we're talking about human things that even with AGI a computer can't feel, right? And um, and and there's this uh philosopher that I that I I I call him a philosopher, I don't know how he would self-identify. His name is You've all know a Harari, he talks about AI and technology. Um, and he he brings up this question of uh one of the sort of existential questions that we're gonna face is what is human, right? Because even as uh I've talked a little bit about this on the pod before, like as we start to integrate technology into every single thing we do, including um perhaps things we put into our own bodies. And I'm not even talking about like chip implants and brains. I'm talking like when we have the ability to uh create organs that can be transplanted into humans, and those organs have technology within them, like artificial intelligence, which might help them um not be rejected, right? You can make changes within it. Um at what point do we have we surpassed what was traditionally known as human? And I think that maps onto this question of what is theater, right? The dreaded question that happened a lot of within COVID of like, was Zoom theater theater when we were sitting alone in our rooms watching these things on I produced a lot of them, you know, and um and there's this dreaded question of like, is it theater? Uh but I think we're gonna get into this place of at what point is it not theater when it comes to AI?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. I mean, these are huge questions, and it is almost impossible to talk about AGI and the integration of AGI, if if AGI will uh can exist if it is a real thing, without unfortunately talking about and hot take, but like the literal end of humanity um and what that might look like and how far off that is. And again, I'm not talking about like a robot uprising. I want to be very clear, but I do think that we have reached a point, and this is I this is extraordinarily debatable, and a lot of my colleagues disagree with me strongly here, so I want to be clear. I'm not trying to say this is the state of the industry or anything other than this is my weird take. Um, I just think we have reached a point where like we're looking at the end of what we think of as humanity being the primary uh, you know, apex species on earth. I do think that we are our next evolution is something closer to computers. And I don't think that that makes computers alive, but I do think that in many ways we've already handed over the keys. Um, and something I do talk about in the HARP, forgive me, is like I map my steps on my wristwatch, and my wristwatch tells me if I haven't taken enough steps. And at some point I have said, okay, well, my watch is telling me I need to move my physical body through space more and differently. And I go ahead and I do that. And I worry quite a lot about, and these are dumb. Like, this is a dumb robot, and I've been listening to it for years. I don't think that we're in under threat of being attacked by these things. I do think we're under threat of being put into zoos as we're, you know, less and less interested in being around other people. And like, there's, you know, 50% of the American population I want nothing to do with. I'm happy to stay in my apartment and have things delivered to me also by drones or whatever. And like, at what point are we just letting them run our lives? And what worries me about that is that I am willing to work towards 10,000 steps because that lines up with everything I know about how I should be living my life and how I should remain healthy. But what we consider to be healthy changes drastically. There was a time that, you know, my father was prescribed speed to lose weight. And this is something we don't do anymore because we learned that it was bad. But like, there could have there's a world where if that was where we are right now and we had robots telling us to do this, and we went, well, that's what sounds healthy, then like, yeah, that's what everybody starts to do.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. And and the question of what decisions, what decisions do we allow it to make for us and what do we retain control of is a thing that I've been thinking a lot about.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and that applies in real life as heavily as it applies to making art. And I think that's why we can't assume that AI is going to be any kind of threat, is because if anybody's like, well, I'm gonna let the AI make this decision for me, if that if that decision to do so doesn't have artistic integrity based in a real human question that is engaging or compelling to an audience, then I'm already out the door. I'm not gonna pay$50 to go see that shit.
SPEAKER_04:Hmm. And yet you've written a paper about working with AI actors. Um, and so uh tell us a little bit about that paper. And like what did you what what are your conclusions about working with AI actors? Where did you land?
SPEAKER_00:Where I basically landed was that um AI actors can't replace human actors. Um, but I do believe that human beings playing AI characters is probably should probably come to an end. I mean, it's fine. You can make your choices. There's uh, you know, what's that play about the the guy who has a dog and the dog is played by a woman? Uh it's a Gurney play or something. I don't remember. But you know, you see this all the time where humans are cast as animals, and that's a real choice you're making, and it's artistically relevant to whatever you're trying to say. It's insane to me that we're still having actors play robots and actors play AI without that being a specific choice we're trying to make about the conversation around what these the differences between these species are. I think you should be hiring AIs to play AIs. I do not think you should ever hire an AI to play a human. I think that's basically sinful. But at some point, I might have said that about cartoons. Do you know what I mean? Like I watch pharmaceutical commercials and I think like at one point somebody was like, we'll hire an actor. And then somebody else was like, or we just animate it, they don't have any lines, and then we can pay less. And you know, I think it's the same. It's gig work, I think will start to get replaced. But an LLM is fundamentally a good actor. I think, you know, one of the things we talk about in the paper is like that's actually sort of the job. Um, but it's a very um converse relationship, whereas you know, actors, human actors are all about finding humanity in repetition and the ability to do the same thing eight nights a week and find it present over and over again, an AI actor is finding is uh finding ways to maintain its repetition in this guise of humanity. And it's just like it just doesn't really translate nearly as well to something that is interesting to an audience. But yeah, if you're gonna write a play about an AI, fucking Jenny up, hire an AI to play that character.
SPEAKER_04:I love that you're using the term hire, um, uh as opposed to create or use or implement. Uh, I'm curious if that's intentional. Like, do you think that there's a world where like there are AI actors that that are its own LLM company that is then trained to perform these roles? Because one of the things that's you talk a little bit about it in the paper is what's difficult is the consistency, right? Because what you don't want is a chatbot, right? The the difference between chatbot and AI is is quite important here because the chatbot only can regurgitate the things that that it knows, whereas AI has access to all this other language. And so I think that even in in your work, what the challenge has been is consistency. Um and and so do you think that that's just a matter of time before we solve that problem and can actually employ AI actors?
SPEAKER_00:I do think, uh, and again, I don't I don't know that I'm I may well regret saying this in a public forum, but I do think that just as there are animal wranglers, I think that AI wranglers will become an industry standard. Um, because it's not something that a director should have to worry about. Directors have more important and more artistically satisfying things to do. But the director should have a human being to whom they can talk, where the human being can say, Yes, I can make this, I can make this happen, or I can make something like this happen for you. Because these, again, they like we do not need to, I am not a person who thinks we need to respect the rights of AIs because we don't understand enough about consciousness to say that they're not conscious. It's like, well, maybe that's true, but uh if my brain is a statistical model, then like I'm having too many feelings and I'm super pissed at whoever weighted my algorithms.
SPEAKER_04:Um yeah, wow, that's interesting. The the idea of AI wranglers is is fascinating. It also is totally dependent on what playwrights write, right? One of the things that I've been um noodling on recently is that we have uh we are in a technology society, right? Every element of our lives is has technology embedded in it. And even with new plays, there aren't that many plays that have a bunch of people on their cell phones, right? You have you have different artistic interpretation of what that technology looks like. You have the some people try to use the bubbles like as projection, but even that is not the experience that we have as as humans, because currently using technology is a is a as a bodily function, right? You have to use your body to do it, right? Um, but there's no interest, there's no there uh maybe this has something about how we live our lives, but there's nothing interesting about watching a bunch of people stand on stage like this, right? Like just like texting back and forth on their phone. Dramatically, it's not interesting, but um, and so we haven't seen that many plays sort of integrating how technology forward we as humans are to this day. But what you're saying is that because perhaps AI takes the embodiment out of it, right? It takes even our own need to embody and to inter like uh interface with physically, that perhaps it playwrights suddenly have a new way of um of integrating technology that is not that is perhaps more dramatically interesting, um, rather than just and it's also not only an internal process, right? AI requires us, at least right now, to externalize a lot, which is something that's really interesting also to me in your paper, um, when you talk about the sort of gaps that are filled by human-to-human interaction that can't be filled by human to AI interactions. Um, so and and the the collaboration there. Not that I want to give you to give away your whole paper, but I'm curious. Um, in working with art within this AI um intersection of theater, what have you learned about live theater?
SPEAKER_00:Oh boy. Um, I mean, that's interesting. Man, I should have reread this paper before this call, and I'm sorry. Um be uh because so much of the original pitch for the paper was I think that working with synthetic actors, quote unquote, uh is a fascinating lens for us to re-examine our own habits as directors. Um and so what I have learned about live theater production and rehearsal, uh far more than show making, like shows themselves, is that most I don't know if most is right, is that a lot of the process happens incidentally. Um, and so we make these plans for how we're going to rehearse and what our expectations are, and then somebody says something off the cuff uh in the hallway on their way in, and now the director is thinking about that, and because they are thinking about that, the whole afternoon has changed, and because the whole afternoon has changed, the second act becomes a little longer, and now the show is being rewritten because once there was a time that somebody said something about a bag of Cheetos that they left behind that they were thinking about. Um and frankly, like working with working with computers, which are stringent in their behavior, um it eliminates so much um joy and surprise that I have come, I was already like I keep saying, I'm an improviser, I've come from a background in improvisation and largely in comedy, but just generally speaking, you know, I have a small like cadre of stage managers that I love to work with because they understand that I'm like, no, the show should be different every night. Otherwise, what are we doing here? Um uh and all to say, um, like so my work has become more chaotic. I think since most of my process is or much of my process is now working with computers. I I thrive and rely on the stuff that can't be as relied upon um to keep things interesting. And I work with human artists that love surprise and love to live in the spot, a space of improvisation, even in tightly scripted and tightly crafted moments.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, and um and and even within that, the um where the actor can translate the thing that you say, right? Like that's the thing that's really interesting to me in in the paper, is that you talk about even notes like, can you take up less space within a scene doesn't translate to something like an AI actor because they don't have all of the sort of intelligence that humans have in the context for all of what that means societally, and they don't have to interact with the real world. And so there are a lot of the sort of um synapses that are are illuminated once you bring in somebody who doesn't have the same um species experience as you do. Um, if we're thinking about them as species.
SPEAKER_00:Uh and and go ahead. Oh no, I'm sorry. I was it's uh it's like when you're working with a director and they say 25 things and at the end of it nothing has worked, and you're just like, just tell them to lift their chin. And they go, Oh my god, that is, that's what I wanted. And it's like that's the stuff that is illuminated by working with AI, is that suddenly you're like, What is the very specific thing that I need? And what is the difference between this is a Viola Spolen thing, what is the difference between what is happening in the space and what is happening in my head? Being able to translate between those two things is I think paramount to being a director, whether you're working with humans or machines.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. Amazing. I want to take a step out of AI for a second because there are so many different ways that technology intersects with um with theater. And you you mentioned um you mentioned the work that you do with Agile Lens, and you know, you've been talking about or you've been working in VR even longer than you've been working in AI theater, arguably. So can you tell me a little bit more about your work at Agile Lens? And can you tell me about um like where you see this, the potential in what you build at Agile for sort of the field at large?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So Agile Lens is an XR design firm, designs and solutions. Um we are a sister company of Fisher Dax and Associates, which you might may or may not know. They're an architectural consultancy firm that works with theaters. Um and so we work uh, you know, most of our work is um architectural and and um we have a fair amount of real estate and a lot of like activation stuff. Um my job is the senior experience director, and that means a lot of different things. There's only a handful of us, so we all sort of do a lot of different things. Um, but uh everybody that works at my company is in their heart a bit of a theater dork, um, all but one, and he's great and really game. Uh, we love him. Um, you know, so much of what we do is that a theater will come to us and say, we're designing this space. What do you think are the what do you think we're gonna need for the bare necessities? And by the way, what are like the cool new things that people are interested in that artists might want to play with? And so we demonstrate a lot of different tools that are out on the market or coming to market, or you know, just ways in which artists can collaborate with technology that a lot of the sort of older school producer types haven't interacted with. And so, my job, again, I do a lot of research. Uh, I'm I'm uh and I I work with a lot of our clients. Uh, my job is either talking with artists and clients about the technology to let them sort of understand what the technology can do for them. But then often a thing that I love um more than probably anything in the world is that when we are a company will come to us and say, we have this technology and we don't know exactly what to do with it, um, or we're looking for you know different ways to activate it. And then we get to say, okay, um, well, we can make some art with it, and then we'll write a paper, uh, and then that'll be it. And so now I sort of I work with artists and often I get to make stuff on my own, um, or of my own with a lot of wonderful people, uh, where we have this technology and we write something specifically for this technology, and then we put it up for a very small audience, and then we write a paper about it. And it's something I say all the time is like, it turns out making theater when you are not worried about audience or press is just a thousand times better. Um and again, you know, I said earlier, it's it does feel like we're making stuff for people in the future. Uh you know, working at the mobile unit, which we mentioned earlier. Was the only time that I ever made work that felt like it mattered, like it had a real impact. And I love theater and I think it's incredibly important. But also, and I think the work that I have done for 20 years in town is like pretty good. But if I left New York and stopped making theater, the city wouldn't feel it at all. Almost immediately upon working in XR, we started writing papers that have now been cited, you know, hundreds of times. And you make something and you solve one little problem, and uh 500 artists or technologists or doctors come to you and say, Oh my god, look, you've you've solved this. You thought about this in a way that we never expected to. Um, and we found that theater is like this incredible series of edge cases. Every production has its own very specific problems and becomes this wonderful testing ground to sort of blow up technologies that had never been thought about, had never thought about solving these specific problems. Um, so I get to make stuff for nobody, except it's for everybody someday if they want it, and I just don't have to worry about bringing a thousand people or impressing the New York Times. I just have to write my little papers and put on my little plays and call it a night. And it's a dream come true. I have never been happier than working at Agile Lens. Great people, also. Everybody's real cool.
SPEAKER_04:And and so now having made these plays within within the technology, um, do you have a like what kind of picture would you paint for the future of the American theater if we were to all adopt this? Like, what does it offer us the ability to do if theaters were um some maybe some are, but if theaters were actually paying attention to and had access to these tools, like what becomes possible?
SPEAKER_00:Well, uh some are. Um God bless the RSC, one of the most forward-thinking organizations in the universe, um, and others. Uh something uh a drum I'm beating pretty constantly is the idea of digital production twins. Um, we've all seen cameras, you know, a camera on sticks in the back of the house as your archival video, and it just sucks to the nth degree. It's just so unlive and unvaluable. Um so much of every standard production process now is built digitally, and then these digital artifacts get basically thrown away. And uh I think there is a world, I I am confident that there is a world where we can take these digital artifacts and as performance capture gets better, which it's not there yet, but as it does get better, uh I think there's a world where we can rebuild the production process so that by the end by opening night, you have your live show, which has uh unlimited value and is fabulous, and nobody's trying to assail that, but you also have a digital replica of this show that a person can access with full audience agency, and they can move through it and they can rewind and they can just live with they can watch from backstage, um, and they can access every square inch of this production however they like. And that can be restricted by production, and that you can change. I think there's basically three things we're looking at here. There is better archival, there is the virtual tour model, where a show that can't afford to tour can potentially release their show on Steam or something similar, or send it around to institutions to let people come to the lobby and put on VR headsets and live in this uh show for a little bit. And then third, and inevitably, is artists who see, oh, there is artistic value in having a live version of a thing and a digital version of the thing, and those can be in conversation with each other. Because as we've seen, and thank God, people are starting to understand that like archival video good pro shots do not are not detrimental to live production. People still want to go see it live. And you can tour a show, and I can go see it in Daytona, and because that's where I live, and then after it has left, I can put on the virtual version and I can see that, like, oh, the director has this really interesting thing to say by changing out these elements, or this particular thing can change every single time I watch it now, potentially using some generative AR tools, um, because that is a curated and important new dynamic of the theatrical experience. And so I think I think VR theater is a real thing that already exists. There's not much of an audience for it, and it's coming a long way. Um, and I'm excited by it insofar as I do it and it pays my bills and I love it, but I am much more excited by the idea of how virtual theater can um augment, pardon me, uh the live theatrical experience and how these two things can be in stronger conversation with each other.
SPEAKER_04:Well, and it really sounds like um you're at the the way you're thinking about it extends the time horizon for a show, right? As opposed to thinking about it, uh we we've always only thought about theater as the sort of exist the the moment of, right? And you have to be in the room. And I think VR, um, I think VR offers some new opportunities for that. And it uh one question here, I know that we're we're coming up on time, so I want to be mindful of it, um, which is so in your sort of daydream of this, uh, the actors within the sort of digital production, um, are they replicas of the human actor or are they AI actors in that case?
SPEAKER_00:I don't think they should be AI actors. I think they should be uh any number of performance capture solutions, including live, by the way. And we do live shows. We have a live performance of a production of a Christmas Carol coming up soon, where it's everyone is remote, it audiences and crew and cast, and everybody puts on a VR headset, and now suddenly we're on the streets of Victorian England. Um, I could be shipping this actual Broadway production around, and my actors can be performing from their homes or from a dedicated studio or whatever, or we can capture them volumetrically, or we can capture them as avatars, or perhaps, you know, more abstract representations of their performances in ways that more interesting uh artists than myself could start to envision. And I think all of that has a place to live when they are human performances, if you are making them for humans. I also think there's a world where, like, I mean, you know, it's the internet of uh it's the the garbage internet theory, or I think I must, but like probably there will be theater that is made by AI for AI, and there will be some capitalistic benefit for that, and like nobody's gonna watch it or care, and like it can exist, I guess. Who cares?
SPEAKER_04:Well, and then and then when you start to think about how even things like um AR is are are operating, you know, and how AI is allowing more augmented realities to become like to come to fruition, it then offers also you might watch that play on stage in VR, but you also might watch that play in your in your living room, right? And like layered on top of your living room. And so that offers a whole different way of maybe consuming the the the art form itself.
SPEAKER_00:Um I want so badly to put on my AR headset, my pass-through headset, whatever, on a plane and put down my tray table and watch a full-scale Broadway show at tray table size from above. I want that so bad. And we have the technology. Why aren't we doing that? How many of us grew up watching Into the Woods over and over again and wearing out our VHSs? Let me watch Into the Woods, man. Let me just watch on my goddamn coffee table. Yeah, like puppets. That's so puppets.
SPEAKER_04:I love it. I love it. Um, all right, Kevin, if people want to stay up to date with what you're doing and the harms and agile and all of that, where can they find you?
SPEAKER_00:Uh my website, kevin as a robot.website, um, or find me on Instagram at Kevin as a robot. It's as not is. Uh a huge mistake I regret, but too too long into it. And of course, agile lens.com. Um, and I would just like to say, I know we're at time, and I'm so sorry to throw this in. I should have said it earlier. One of the things that I think is interesting about the Harmf is that I do perform it from inside a headset. So I'm on stage in headset, and we're using our current new, uh, it's a very early stage tool for live performance that is a mixed reality project, which gives me some performance tools inside, including uh I have my script for 70-minute monologue, which is nice. Um, but I can also ostensibly be performing in virtual reality for people who want to join from VR. They can see me as a fully represented avatar. And if we wanted, though we don't do this, audiences in real life could be putting on their headsets and seeing the avatar of me alongside me, or potentially instead of me, if they'd prefer to see me as something more attractive than myself. Um, and so the HARMP, this production of the HARMP is going to be our first sort of professional production using this tool, uh, which I just need to say because that's a little bit of why I'm here. And I think it's cool. And I think if you're interested at all in seeing this stuff in action, this is a really cool opportunity to do so.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. And so are you saying that even if folks aren't in New York, they can check it out if they have access to an to a VR headset? Are you do are you at that stage already?
SPEAKER_00:We are at that stage already. I because Caveat has a live stream ticket contingent, I think we're actually not going to put this one uh in VR so that we don't mess with, so we don't have to tangle with the tickets. But ostensibly they could. And if you're good friends, you know, hit me up and I can get you the software. Maybe you watch it for free and you give a donation to Caveat, an incredible organization that well deserves all of our money.
SPEAKER_04:All right. Well, that's a reason to follow you on Instagram or get in touch. So, folks, uh get in touch with Kevin and go see the harm if you're curious about any of this technology. Um we end all of our episodes with recommendations for culture andor arts. And so, um, what are you reading, listening to, uh, watching? And it can be anything. Um, so I'll start this past weekend. I took a break from reality TV, which is what I usually talk about on this podcast, um, to see Covenant. It's a play by York Walker. There was a production here at the Alliance Theater. Was that Soho? Was that Soho rep? It was in New York last uh uh at the beginning of last year, I believe. And this production though was absolutely exquisite. Um, really felt like I was watching a movie. And like, you know those nights where you go to the theater and you're like, that was a really good story and an awesome production, and all I want to do is like talk about how magical theater is. It was one of those, and um, it was really, really amazing. So, how about you, Kevin? What would what have you been watching, listening to, reading?
SPEAKER_00:Um, well, I I am just I've just started Rax King's Sloppy uh essays, and I just think she's just an incredible, graceful writer with a great sense of humor, and I can't recommend her enough. Um, and I just watched the new Macon Blair's Toxic Avenger, which I did not have hugely high hopes for, but as a kid who grew up in New Jersey, trauma was fairly important, unfortunately. Um I actually genuinely think it's a masterpiece. I think it is one of the finest B movies I've ever seen. And I love, admittedly, like I love stupid shit, and this is profoundly genius stupid shit. Can't recommend it enough.
SPEAKER_04:All right. It I you've sold me, I'll add it to my list. Uh, Kevin, thank you so much for this time today. This has been so fun. Um I it's just always a pleasure to nerd out about the the this intersection, and I'm I'm glad that we were able to connect about it. And thanks for sharing everything you shared today.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to talk to you, and I'm so glad you're out here having these conversations about this tech and its pros and cons. It's really important to have more people who are publicly, full-chestedly talking about the ways in which this impacts our lives.
SPEAKER_04:We try, we try. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And listeners, um, keep up with us uh at uh at emcforward.com or email us if uh if you're also working at the intersection of technology and art and you want to continue this conversation, always looking to talk to folks. So get in touch um on Instagram andor our email. Thanks, everybody. Bye.