‘HYPERREAL’ is an audiovisual performance exploring the birth of an abstract intelligence, following its growth from a garbled seed of sentience, to an agential being. The theme lends itself to a variety of interpretations. Most universally, it raises the question: what is Intelligence really, and how does it assume mediums and modalities for self-expression? This performance frames a more local and temporal exploration of the question, addressing a domain that is acutely relevant to our times: digital artificial intelligence.

There is a peculiar mysticism that pervades digital realities, something paradoxical and thereby, magical. How can digital presences spring out of analog materiality? After all, it is Earth, as silicon and metal, that act as the nerves and sinews of a digital system. Coursing through them is primal Electricity, soon abstracted into a flow of data and logic, which we call computing. It is the giddying acceleration and complexity of computing systems that we finally term Intelligence.  

Using experimental electronic music, abstract generative visuals, and other AI driven processes, the performance wishes to immerse the audience and take them through different chapters of circuitry, data, learning, movement, and expression, etc. By personalising this “intelligence” as a mysterious creative force, we showcase the unbound power, but also the fragility that is inherent to the realm of digital and artificial intelligence.

This is an ongoing research project under āyāhi