/Imagine: Hellos and Goodbyes

In the organizer's words:

FARN. Collective

There is a website where you can calculate the exact date of your death. You enter a few personal details and an algorithm calculates the months and weeks, days and hours you have left. The "Death Clock" has the power to change a life. With the certainty of death, it is not only the time that lies ahead that changes. The life that has already been lived also changes.

A man alone on stage. He is preparing his farewell concert. While the images of a biography flash by on three screens, he plays the songs of his life. Songs that tell of love and friendship, of loss and loneliness. Every death marks a turning point, a break around which everything is rearranged. The narrative changes on the screen. New branches and new possibilities appear. The orderly cosmos of one life becomes a multiverse of possible lives that exist in parallel in time. What just seemed like the faded photo memories of a youth in the 1980s turns out to be "AI-generated" - more precisely, the imagination of a machine learning system. What happens when a person on stage enters into a dialog with this so-called "artificial intelligence"?

For /Imagine: Hellos and Goodbyes, performer Daniel Nerlich has made his personal biography available in the form of interviews. As a transcribed data set, it provides the starting point for ever new rewrites of his life by machine learning systems. To generate an image or video with such a system, the command "/imagine" is used. In this way, the seemingly intelligent systems dream up imaginary images from text commands, so-called prompts. In cooperation with these technologies, alternative life paths and memories are created that constantly generate new narratives of a biography.

With

With: Daniel Nerlich
Director: Tom Schneider & Tobias Staab (FARN. Kollektiv)
Stage: Nadja Sofie Eller
Costume: Andrijana Trpković
3D design & AI programming: Warja Rybakova
Video: Nadja Sofie Eller & Tobias Staab

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Landesverband Freie Tanz- und Theaterschaffende Baden-Württemberg (LaFT BW) e.V. and Kulturamt der Stadt Freiburg im Breisgau.

Image credits: All photos were created by Nadja Sofie Eller with the help of artificial intelligence.