The intersection of AI and art has become one of the most contentious areas of modern debate. With great swathes of discussion revolving around the ethics of using algorithmically generated video, text and indeed even music, it’s easy to overlook that all technology that is considered new eventually becomes commonplace and ordinary. All art evolves over time, and, for good or ill, change is part of the process.
One area which has not seen quite so much debate is the effect of AI and its potential future uses in the sphere of operatic arts. I had the opportunity to see a flagship opera production aiming to explore the juncture of opera and future technology as part of an interdisciplinary symposium on AI and Digital Innovations for Voice and Vocal Music.
AI Kaidan: Yūrei (Ghost) of the AI Empire is a stripped-back and barebones retelling of the famous Edo-era Japanese Kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan, the two-hundred-year-old tale of a vengeful, murdered wife returning to seek retribution on her treacherous husband and his new lover whose scheming led to her death. Instead of being crafted as traditional theatre, instead, co-director, conceptualist and dramaturg Dr. Alexandra Huang-Kokina has turned it into an interactive chamber opera.
Rather than being set in yesteryear Tokyo, this new incarnation of the story has been reframed against a dystopian future, where rival global mega-corporations vie for power and control over advanced AI technology. The plot, as narrated by Stephanie Lamprea, sees Jacob (Colin Murray), a recently shamed and ousted CEO of a European company, form a new alliance with a Japanese conglomerate by marrying Oiwa (Stephanie Lai). However, her jealous friend Ohana (Lynn Bellamy) also has designs on Jacob, and from there, the tragedy unfolds.
Where in the original Kabuki play and later traditional interpretations Oiwa would return as a bloodthirsty ghost, in this neo-futurist interpretation, she is instead reborn as an AI-imbued automaton, the side-effect of which is that it allows the audience to add a measure of interactivity to the piece, connecting through their mobile devices as “nodes” and voting on the direction of the story, choosing whether it ends in bloody mayhem or kind forgiveness.
It’s important to note that this was the first pilot performance of AI Kaidan, as part of a two-year-long project to institute, experiment and refine a series of immersive aspects of the piece with a view to creating a new form of interactive opera. At this stage, the piece only included a single interactive element, but one which was simple and effective enough in its use, allowing the audience to vote on the final outcome of the story.
The performance itself was well performed by the players and musicians, with Huang-Kokina’s libretto jauntily selling the story with simple effectivity, adding some opportunity for flair and some nice moments of humour peppered between the bombast and tragedy. The music, by composer and conductor Atzi Muramatsu, straddles the line between the traditional and the modern by using stylistic aspects of Gagaku court music blended into a western ensemble of cello (Robin Mason), violin (Paul Doherty) and piano (Alexandra Huang-Kokina). It managed to feel grand without being ostentatious, trying to fuse the old and new in a manner that helped propel the emotions of the story.
As this was technically an open book pilot performance as the finale of an event, there was a stark and somewhat barebones feel to much of it, something which presumably is planned to be dressed up far more in later iterations, with more elaborate staging, blocking and a larger performance, to tie into the planned expanded iterations of the interactive technology. As it stands, the opera is little more than a taster of what it could turn into, a very novel beginning to a concept, and to be fair, was never sold as anything more than a delicate first step into a new world. As it stands, despite the AI themes, other than the projected backgrounds being generated imagery, there wasn’t any clear AI input into the production other than the story itself.
In all, this was certainly an interesting and entertaining performance, really one which was less of an evening out and more of the end of a larger technological symposium designed for those already positioned at the cutting edge of this technology. It is also worth noting that there was a brief interruption as a result of an audience member’s illness, however it was handled quietly and kindly by the staff and the company, and didn’t cause any real disruption.
AI Kaidan may be the beginning of a new operatic form, or simply an expressive and interesting piece of experimental entertainment. In any case, it is a sign of the forward momentum of technology and its place in the arts. The future of AI technology is still in its infancy, it’s increasingly clear that it’s not going away anytime soon.Wherever you stand on the wider AI debate, it’s a conversation that needs to be continued and explored fully. The very real concerns that many artists have are certainly valid, but at the same time, it’s clear that the embracing of this new technology can and likely will become an inevitable part of the future of artistic endeavour in many forms.
At least with what has been presented by Operactive Arts, it’s clear that some of the hands in which this vast, morally and applicatory diverse technology rests are putting it to meritorious use. As ever, the melding of the ancient and the futuristic can be and has always been the best way to explore understand the human condition.