Machine Symphony & After AGI

A double bill provoking human-AI creativity with hand-built AI instruments and a techno-apocalypse musical set ten years from now.

What does it mean to create in the age of the machine?

This double bill brings together two original works that ask that question from radically different angles — one through a hand-built orchestra of AI-embedded instruments, one through an original musical set ten years in our future.

Machine Symphony is a live performance by composer and multi-instrumentalist Antonis Christou. Playing entirely alone, Antonis performs with an orchestra of his own invention, including, among others, hacked children’s toys, a robotic drum kit, a microtonal arcade machine, and at the center of it all, the Hyper Bass — a custom-built string instrument with an NVIDIA GPU physically embedded inside it, capable of understanding how it's being played and harmonizing back by physically vibrating its own strings. There are no pre-recorded tracks. Everything you hear is played, sampled, or live-coded in the moment - an act of creation with deeply inhuman tools used towards a deeply human end.

After AGI: The Techno-Apocalypse Musical, set in 2034, it follows Theos, a disillusioned AI engineer hiding in a bunker after the technology he helped build begins to fracture the world. Cleo, his AI companion, is an outdated mental health bot he tried to make into a startup out of college, but failed. It is a story about guilt, creation, and what we owe each other when the systems we build outgrow us.

Together, these two works form an evening with a genuine attempt to figure out what art is for when machines are becoming creative agents of their own.