Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2017 - 10

ARCOS' wordmark and imagery for the production of Domain (left) synthesizes elements resulting from its diverse transmedia creation
process, including an emphasis on the natural environment inspired by audience-participants' ongoing interactions with the ANNI
installation; the three dot logo developed with User Interface Design methods to represent ANNI in the interactive installation; and a
typeface generated by a machine learning algorithm by Erik Bernhardsson (right), which averaged together the images of 50,000 existing
fonts to produce a blurry alphabet. The imprecise, fuzzy look of this "new" typeface served as a metaphor for the subtly nonhuman design
elements ARCOS provided as clues that the performance was taking place within an artificial consciousness.

ARCOS created and presented Domain over the
course of eight months in 2016, with the project taking place in multiple media and platforms, as well as
in numerous physical locations and online sites. It was
developed with the support of institutional collaborations, guest artist commissions, and residencies, including at the Division of Dance at Texas State University,
which co-hosted the production's evening-length culminating theatrical performance with the Department
of Philosophy at Engagement: Philosophy and Dance, an
interdisciplinary symposium. The co-authors of this article collaborated on the production, with Texas State
University's Scott Vandenberg serving as lighting designer and technical director and ARCOS' Eliot Gray
Fisher creating the script, music, and media design. The
authors worked in conjunction with co-directors and
choreographers Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann, and composers Brandon Guerra and Chris "Isto"
White. Throughout, Domain explored the urgent philosophical implications of the rapid evolution of artificial
intelligence.
Domain leads the audience inside the complex relationship between Jonah, an unorthodox digital savant
and programmer, and her intelligent creation, ANNI.
Jonah's desire to make a profound impact on the world
and free humanity of unnecessary labor feed her ambition to create ANNI, the world's first sentient artificial intelligence. By intertwining choreography with
dialogue, projected video, and soundscapes, the multiplatform production interprets the essentially human
experiences of birth, love, loss, and death. The narrative
is told in a series of surreal, fragmented scenes, ostensibly from Jonah's perspective. The scenes reveal how
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ANNI causes the mysterious illness and untimely death
of its creator. Yet, the audience eventually learns that
the dying Jonah created a gift for ANNI, encrypted and
hidden deep inside ANNI's memory banks; this gift
was Jonah's first-person experiences of moments in her
life. Jonah designed these implanted memories to help
ANNI achieve its ultimate goal: a glimmer of understanding of the feeling of human existence. The entire
narrative, we learn, has actually been replaying within
the circuits that make up the "mind" of the conscious
machine, at a time long after our species has ceased
to exist on the planet. This dramatic revelation is constructed to inspire audience reflection about how our
machines define and are defined by our humanity. All
aspects of the production's transmedia design originated
with human creators imagining how our increasingly
intelligent devices might interpret it in a way we humans would recognize as meaningful.
ARCOS set out to probe the recent explosion of
artificial intelligence through the production of Domain by allowing the performance to expand beyond
the walls of the theatre and on to the screens that increasingly shape our existence. The design deliberately
blurred the boundaries of mechanical and human performance, reality and virtual reality, and live and asynchronous presentation. The cross-platform nature of the
design process called particular attention to the diversity of media and contemporary technologies employed
to weave the enigmatic sci-fi narrative, resulting in inventive hybrid elements. ARCOS immersed the viewer
into the world of the performance through these novel
re-combinations, which contributed significantly to the
creative development of the piece.
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