Anima™
Alexander Schubert one of today's leading young artists in Germany, is also one of the most adept at bringing technology to the stage. Schubert has incorporated advances in artificial intelligence, explored over the past eighteen months with researchers at IRCAM. Anima™, his multimedia theater, is the name of an institution where visitors come into contact with their past and probable future. The interpreters, "patients" of this institute, obey a scenario delivered in real time. Everything has been developed from the real data of the performers from the Decoder Ensemble, in a continuous process of transformation and alienation. The characteristic features of the emotion, the genre, the affects will be varied and will generate artificial avatars. Through AI neural networks, classes and groups of individuals with the same properties are extracted to produce new entries: atypical, unexpected, fascinating results.
Anima™ is not just another survivalist fiction: it is about thinking of technology as the ultimate tool for introspection, rich with a thousand possibilities and a thousand dangers.
Alexander Schubert artistic direction, composition - Premiere 2022
Commissioned by IRCAM-Centre Pompidou
Decoder Ensemble
Leopold Hurt, Andrej Koroliov, Jonathan Shapiro
Ines Assoual, Si-Ying Fung, Stefanie Inhelder, Guy Marsan dance
Thomas Goepfer IRCAM computer music design
Dionysios Papanicolaou IRCAM electronics
Antoine Caillon, Philippe Esling (Musical Representations team), Nicolas Obin, Axel Roebel, Léane Salais (Sound Analysis-Synthesis team) IRCAM-STMS scientific collaboration
Luca Bagnoli IRCAM sound diffusion
Patricia Carolin Mai choreography
Lucas Gutierrez video design
Stefan Britze set design
Felina Levits costume design
Diego Muhr lighting design
Lise Herdam assistant choreography
Michael Brailey assistant text
