AI Looked at My Plays and Got Weird With It
To mark the end of our 2023 season, I took a handful of photos from our theatre and film productions - moments filled with emotion, movement, and chaos - and asked RunwayML to re-imagine them with a new prompt.
The results? Strange, surreal, haunting - and kind of beautiful. Here’s a thread that will absolutely mess with your head:
The first prompt: "Two people listen as one vents his fears, it’s all screams and tons of suspense”. This following one is from “de Amores & Zombies”:
The next one is from “El Último Inventor”: “Philo Farnsworth (Paolo Salinas) creates the first ever television transmitter... but things quickly spiral into a culinary explosion.”:
The next one is also from “de Amores & Zombies”: "A story centered on the conflict between a father and his son, alone in a lighthouse..."
In the next one, it’s honestly unclear whether the weapon Jesus Suadi is carrying in “El Show Que Sale Mal” is a gun, a sword... or some madness:
The incredible Majo Bustamante faints in “El Show Que Sale Mal” - and takes everyone down with her, fusing them into a single entity:
Here it just jump-cuts into another stage where Florence (Dinora Alfaro) becomes an opera singer mid-anxiety attack:
It makes one think: the AI model is reading everything so well because these photos are transmitting thousands of emotions. Credit to the genius eye of our photographer René Figueroa, who captured these spectacular images.
Here’s Regina Cañas from “El Último Inventor”:
It’s scary to think about where technology is taking us.
But one thing I know for sure...
… Theatre isn’t going anywhere. You can’t replace it, you can’t generate it. Theatre is us - all of us who step on stage, live, to share our most intimate and truthful emotions.
In a world rushing toward simulation, theatre still offers something real. It’s one of the few places where truth isn’t programmed - it’s lived. It can’t recreate the silence before a line, the shared breath between actor and audience, or the feeling of someone putting their whole self out there.
More stories soon.
