In 2025, at The VORTEX Theatre in Austin, Texas, Syntax Error: The Quickening of AI will premiere as the second installment of my “cyberdrama“¹ trilogy.

Context:

On October 30, 2023, President Biden’s “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” casts an ominous shadow over a bloated tech sector entrenched in cutthroat competition for dominance. As powerful figures prophesize a global existential crisis, the world stands at a crossroads. One path points to the brink of an unpredictable machine-led coup d’état and the other towards the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough with the profound potential to tackle urgent issues like climate change, poverty, and immigration. In the midst of this intersecting knot, artists — the myth-makers of our time — grapple with the challenge of narrating these emerging tales. 

Vision:

As a theater artist, my exploration centers on the encroaching impact of artificial intelligence, challenging audiences to grapple with its paradoxes and implications. The project assembles kaleidoscopic collaborators, including a choral conductor, burlesque choreographer, knitters, weavers, a voice coach, actors, dancers, an electronic composer, a visual artist specializing in generative AI art, tinkerers, hackers, writers, BIPOC software engineers, Indigenous game designers, a dramaturg, and more.

My cyberdrama trilogy delves into the electronic wilderness of our plugged-in era, cultivating radical spaces for public engagement. Syntax Error aims to foster dialogue, contemplation, and intentional muddiness of ideas, integrating traditional, inter-modal, interactive, and immersive theatricality. The performance itself becomes a gateway to computational theories, featuring acts such as a live trivia game show dissolving and devolving assumptions about AI, an embodied choreography of a neural network with syntax error consequences, original compositions spliced from previously recorded aural trances, sparse dialogue oscillating between pedagogical rhetoric and glossolalia fervor, integrated body projections, and virtual reality competitions. This multifaceted approach provides a theatrical experience that both entertains and educates.

Furthermore, Syntax Error parallels the mechanization of the United States one hundred years ago, an era not dissimilar to today’s innovation, exploitation, segregation, unionization, and enfranchisement. Songs from the 1920s now in the public domain–blues, jazz, and speakeasy dance bands that proliferated during prohibition enrich the soundscape. Scenic design highlights an amalgamation of punk aesthetics: steam, cyber, and anarcho. Multilingual conversations include English, Spanish, Nahuatl, Lakota, French, Mandarin and the programming languages Python, React and Angular. Audiences will have opportunities to create a simple program in a language of their choice. The performers will then perform the program in real-time execution. Strategically placed, a failure in formatting, sequencing, or spelling—a syntax error—will result in an ether of spectacle and sound.

The thematic underpinnings trace back to Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician, and her aspiration for a machine to think like a human. From Lovelace’s time to today, the concept evolved into machine learning and artificial intelligence. The production draws connections to my earlier cyberdrama Privacy Settings: A Promethean Tale, exploring the disturbing parallels between privacy rights, colonization of data collection, and the gift of fire (information). In 2023, the global obsession with AI and its mythologies has reached unprecedented levels. From health to finance, AI’s impact exacerbates collective anxiety. The rapid development, with complex dependencies on global economies, places us within a noosphere, where technologies dominate everyday experiences. In the United States, a significant social gap exists between those who design, develop, and deploy cybertech, contributing to extreme bias and disproportionality. Syntax Error emerges as an exploration into the heart of this technological revolution. It seeks to engage audiences in the critical discourse surrounding artificial intelligence while combining artistic expression and an wholly bespoke experience.

 

1. The neologism “cyberdrama,” coined by Janet Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, interlaces philosophies, trends, innovations, dangers, historiographies, potentials, enactments, and mysteries of information technologies and computer programming. ↩︎