Formerly Known As

Formerly Known As … art?

With cloned voices and a script generated by chatGPT, URLAND runs away with AI. Or does AI run away with URLAND? Formerly Known As is a surreal, Blade-Runner-esque meta-performance that questions the shifting meaning of art. The collective enters into a dialogue with AI to jointly create a performance about a performance collective that works with AI to jointly create a performance about what it means to be human. Meta, in other words.

A game between creator and his creation. Is this ART(like) or can it go away? If we can no longer see the difference between ‘real’ and artificial, what is really real? What is art? And where artistry was unique to humans, perhaps even as that which distinguished us from other animals, AI effortlessly imitates everything and seems to be able to create without limits - what does that say about being human?

Promt: “Act as an experienced, experimental script maker. Search the web for performance collective URLAND. Craft a theater script for their new performance about a performance collective using A.I. to create their new performance. Make it a Blade-Runner-esque metafiction. Make it so that the audience can't distinguish it from an authentic URLAND performance. Leave room for a plot twist at the end.”

URLAND embraces the unknown, and has seen things you people wouldn't even believe. All these moments will be lost, like tears in rain. Time to die.

About URLAND

URLAND works collectively. URLAND is autonomous. URLAND wants Gesamtkunst. URLAND has no method. URLAND experiments. URLAND is paradoxical. URLAND is somewhere between artificial and real. URLAND appropriates, quotes and samples. URLAND clashes. URLAND believes in live art in digital times.

URLAND, an innovative performance collective from Rotterdam, consists of Geräuschmacher Jimi Zoet, Bildermacher Marijn Alexander de Jong, Geschichtenmacher Thomas Dudkiewicz and a permanent group of fellow fighters. URLAND makes eclectic, interdisciplinary performances that are a clash between different styles, forms and themes, between visual culture and world literature, data and dada, digital oracles and philosophy. URLAND focuses on the fundamental, on telling and theatricalizing existential stories that make the elusiveness of the contemporary tangible.