Even 200 years after its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still resonates. This brilliant story is a powerful metaphor for our collective anxieties about technology and its capacity to escape our control. Artificial intelligence activates those fears maybe more than any other technology ever has. So, what might happen if we invited AI to dinner? In this episode of Sandbox Lance Weiler, Rachel Ginsberg and Nick Fortugno sit down to discuss A Dinner with Frankenstein and share their experience of collaborating with a machine.
A Dinner with Frankenstein AI had its world premiere at IDFA earlier this month. Over the course of two intimate evenings A Dinner with Frankenstein dug deeply into the tensions between human and machine in an immersive, multisensory environment that mixed food, conversation and artificial intelligence. This interactive dinner experience is created by pioneers in storytelling and technology Lance Weiler, Rachel Ginsberg and Nick Fortugno, and presented in cooperation with the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and IDFA DocLab.
A multi-year research project, Frankenstein AI challenges commonly dystopian narratives around artificial intelligence, and seeks to provoke and broaden conversation around the trajectory of this rapidly emerging technology.
Beginning with the Sundance Film Festival this past January and over the course of next two years, we’ll invite the public into our process as collaborators through an evolving series of activations and experiences both online and off, that will traverse immersive theatre, browser-based interactions, community design, and other performative and experiential media.
Developed and produced in collaboration with the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, Frankenstein AI: a monster made by many is a creative system– a network of projects around a central narrative – designed to provoke exploration around possible shared futures for artificial intelligence.
For more information please visit Frankenstein AI