THE WEIRD & THE EERIE

Me, you, the avatar and everything else we remember – an AI-based exercise in concert

Ai Weiwei posed AI 81 questions – we confront AI with our memories: ‘the weird&the eerie’ is an innovative, cross-media format that is simultaneously a performance, a concert and an installation. The author Thomas Köck and the musician Andreas Spechtl, who devise danceable readymades with ghostly soundsccapes under the label ghostdance take on their digital ghosts here supported by percussionist Katharina Ernst and saxophonist Annea Lounatvuori in a hybrid installation by Michael v. zur Mühlen and Martin Miotk: deceptively similar photoreal- istic digital doppelgängers, avatars that pursue them back to the villages where they grew up in Austria in the 1990s. The original village as an open world, a decade whose ghosts now haunt us more than ever in the midst of war, refugees, displacement, far right extremism, xenophobia and the rise of the populist right.

A chorus of virtual ghosts, historical avatars, revenants, doppelgängers and demons, oper- ating between facts and fakes, psychological recesses, secret portals, barbed wire in the forests of our childhood and an exploation of man and machine. What does a digital double remember, what is actually “our own” memory? Who do we become when we end up face to face with our- selves? And can an AI now sing or not? Director Michael v. zur Mühlen was awarded the German Theatre Prize ‘Der Faust’ for his last multimedia production ‘opera – a future game’ in 2023. The distinguished Austrian writer Thomas Köck is working here for the fifth time in succession for Kunstfest Weimar.