A FREE evening performance celebrating the latest techno-arts, part of Leicester's Art-AI Festival 2019, taking place at Phoenix*.

The event presents Improbotics, which is both an improvised comedy show and a live Turing test: an actual artificial intelligence-based chatbot is performing in the show alongside human improvisers. The AI sends lines to one of the improvisers via an earpiece. The cast’s impossible and hilarious challenge is to justify - physically and emotionally - lines that may make no sense at all. The audience’s challenge is to guess who is the AI and who is Human. Piotr Mirowski, a research scientist in artificial intelligence as well as a theatre and improv actor, comes back to Art-AI Leicester to direct Improbotics and to talk about the science of chatbots and the use of AI to inspire performance artists. Last year, Piotr and his collaborator Kory Mathewson presented HumanMachine, their work on AI improv; Improbotics takes this further with a full cast of professional theatre actors and of seasoned improvisers.

Join us for an exciting evening of machine-led mayhem and hilarity. The show starts promptly at 18:30pm and runs to approximately 19:45pm in Screen 2**.

Speaker Bio

Improbotics / HumanMachine

Improbotics was co-founded by Piotr Mirowski (London, UK) and Kory Mathewson (Edmonton, Canada), two research scientists in artificial intelligence as well as professional actors and improvisers, who were joined by Jenny Elfving (Stockholm, Sweden), drama and language instructor at KTH, as well as by large casts of improvisers in their three respective hometowns, making this a fully international collaboration.

Improbotics, which has performed at Improvaganza and at the Rapid Fire Theatre in Edmonton, in London, at Camden Fringe, at Brighton Fringe, at Impro Amsterdam, at Festival International de Théâtre d’Improvisation Subito! in Brest, France, and Presens Improkällare in Stockholm, was featured in the New York Times (“A Robot Walks Into a Bar. But Can It Do Comedy?”, 8 August 2018) and New Scientist (“AI tries bad improv comedy to trick people into thinking it is human”, 14 September 2018). The troupe at encouraging an arts-meet-science interdisciplinary exploration of how actors can seamlessly perform while controlled by a machine.

Piotr Mirowski has been improvising for twenty years and was a member of New York-based volunteer improv charity Cherub Improv before co-founding HumanMachine, and Improbotics - two artistic experiments fusing improv with AI - as well as Wretched Strangers, a European theatre company producing aiming at giving a voice to foreigners living in the UK. Piotr obtained an MSc in computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France in 2002 and a PhD in deep learning at NYU in 2011 with Turing Award-winning professor Yann LeCun.

Kory Mathewson is an award-winning comedian with Canadian theatre company Rapid Fire Theatre and performs and teaches improv regularly around the world. Kory is currently finishing his PhD in robotics at the University of Alberta.

*You may also be interested in a FREE conference taking place at Phoenix, including talks by world leading artists - book here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/state-of-the-ai-art-tickets-59371400457?ref=estw

**Tickets are also available for the earlier afternoon lecture and VIP launch event - book here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/humanmachine-tickets-59403193551

Promotional image: copyright Mario Klingemann, used with permission

This event is funded by Arts Council England, De Montfort University, including its award winning #DMULocal programme and Phoenix Leicester