is the knowledge-sharing platform for the 

. Explore the experiments and bold ideas behind the Academy's Fellowship programme, delve into the science behind the projects of our HIDA researchers, and explore the results of international collaborations.

is a platform for discovery and documentation. Each 

showcases a unique artistic-technological research project, with topics as diverse as the use of AI in theatrical design, choreography for and with robotics, and the possibilities for theatre in virtual spaces. Each 

 offers the chance to learn more about the members of our artistic research network. By pooling our knowledge in such a way, creative research into theatre, performance and digital technologies can become more accessible, sustainable, and artistically innovative.

Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Academy will award a total of 54 fellowships between 2019 and 2022, each lasting for five months. The 

 are designed for people interested in artistic-technical research which explores the possibilities for digital narratives in theatrical spaces, as well as their practical implementation. Fellows have researched a variety of digital methods (motion capture, coding, XR, VR, AR, sensor technologies, robotics, and more) across artistic fields including opera, dance, orchestra and drama. 

Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy

(HIDA), the Academy for Theatre and Digitality has offered joint research fellowships at the interface of digital art and cutting edge scientific research since 2021. The HIDA fellowships are kindly supported by the 

Artificial Intelligence

Installation

VR (Virtual Reality)

Puppetry

Interactive

Stage Design

Dance

Sound Design

Theater Dortmund
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Management Team:

Executive Director
Tobias Ehinger

Administrative Director
Martin Lizan

Director of the Opera
Heribert Germeshausen

Director of the Ballet
Xin Peng Wang

General Music Director
Gabriel Feltz

Artistic Director of the Schauspiel
Julia Wissert

Director of the Children's and Youth Theater
Andreas Gruhn

Director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality
Marcus Lobbes

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Fellowship

HIDA

discover cutting-edge digital research in theatre and performance 
meet our research fellows and collaborators in the 

Portal: Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Christiane is working on a framework of how to prototype and evaluate social protocols and society building methods in play and theatre context with (inter)active audiences. Markus is curious about playing around/hacking different technologies. A shared interest that we figured out is smartwatches as social devices.

For interesting group interactions with smartwatches as devices (that do not require mobile phones), it would be interesting to have them interconnected, being able to sense (the distance and more) of each other, to measure the carrier's body-information (heart-rate, movement-pattern) and to be able to function as a communication device (with each other e.g. to push and receive game elements or to receive global push notifications).

Here are the specifications of the hardware we need:

how to organize subgroups (tribes) of an instant society in a way that their actions have meaningful impact and can be evaluated afterwards

how to prototype new kinds of social protocols with intuitive instructions/means

how to model a kind of “social sense” (to feel closeness and distance, to feel attention and aversion)

how to model abstract resources (as time) in an intuitive way

how to make the interface as intuitive as possible

build a network where the watches communicate with one another

build a server which saves game state and communicates with the smartwatches

2 x bangle.js *All the Espruinos!* edition

(Since some months we are watching the following watch  makers 

. Unfortunately through the outbreak of Corona the supply chain of the makers is interrupted, so we do not know if we can receive the devices (that were promised not before March 2020) in time. We started looking for alternatives now.)

a simple notebook which functions as a server

bluetooth hubs and maybe wiFi access points

Christiane Hütter

Markus Schubert

We like to see technology as possible space, or making possible space, for participatory processes. During this fellowship, we will use theatre as a living space for encounters, with the research questions: How can we construct society together? And how can we make this process visible for audiences? 
We want to develop a sustainable format for collaborative discourse, in which people can together experiment with different forms of organisation for society. This could start on a small scale, with a family, and can become quite big: How to organise a country?

******

Performance

Networked Objects

Sensors

2020

Besides the aesthetic implementation, we are interested in two main elements:

1. How can non-verbal communication between space (built from sound and scenography) and spectators imply a plot line or narrative?

2. How can the environment's own characteristics play a role, so that they can allow conclusions to be drawn about motivations and correlations? 

Jakob Lorenz

Stella Lennert

'PALIMPSEST' engages with virtual space as an interactive stage, and explores narration through interaction instead of representation. For this, the project takes theatrical literature as an anchor and combines it with elements of gaming. The dramatic texts act as a common ground, a guideline through unfamiliar virtual environments that follow strange rules. PALIMPSEST is experienced via VR goggles and headphones. 

PALIMPSEST

Drama

2022

Humane Methods (2019-present) is a project consisting of happenings and stage productions where dancetheatre, bio-art, interactive music, adaptive lighting, and AI technology integrate into living ecosystems. Each work in the series acts as a branch of a rhizome: each dives into different facets of the same theme and world. The works created so far – 

 (2020) and the forthcoming ΣXHALE (2021-) – combine in different ways performing arts with technology and the human with the non-human to reveal algorithmic violence through sensory, physical and ahuman strategies. It is an aesthetic research into how a synthesis of symbols, movement, music and AI can enable posthuman forms of empathy.

℧R is a solo performance for a body, AI algorithms, lights and the vibrational force of sound. 

Embodied in Donnarumma’s musical instrument XTH Sense, an interactive, machine learning algorithm transforms the inner sound of muscles, blood, and bones into a real-time choreography of movement, sounds and light. Drawing on Donnarumma’s more recent movement research, the piece combines multi-sensorial stimulation with human-computer interaction and somatic practices to test the seeming impossibilities of bodily articulation and repetition. 

℧R is a walk in the dark. A thin body walks while a dim light shines. A path covered in soil is between them. Gazeless, the figure walks and prays, walks and prays, walks and, entranced, pries into the darkness. Its red cloth sanctifies it. Its missing face alienates it. The walk is a loop, a prayer, an aggression, an annihilation and a transformation. An AI computer vision system watches over the body, attempting to distinguish the body from the ‘noise’ surrounding it. The AI wants to represents what it sees, but the system works against itself in a paradoxical loop; the more the algorithm learns to see, the brighter the light becomes. In the eyes of the algorithm, the body is eaten by the storm of light.

The latest chapter in the Humane Methods series is ΣXHALE (2021-). A poetic reflection on ethics in algorithmic societies, ΣXHALE is a procedural and participatory piece lasting several days.

It develops in loops, performed simultaneously by 6 performers* and an AI computer-vision system. As it watches the performers repeat a proto-prayer ritual, the AI learns their movements in the space and then begins searching for anomalies, something that deviates from what it expects to see. The learning process is accurately transformed in real time in music and lighting, influencing thus the events in the form of audiovisual stimuli. With each repetition, each variation and each anomaly, the loops mutate into stories of violence and empathy and the audience is asked to choose how they want to participate in these stories. The interaction between audience, performers and AI gives life to an endless sequence of micro-narratives.

AI in theatre and performance: Strategy & Questions

Technical Infrastructure

The Autoencoder

A Performing Machine

How To: Technological Infrastructure

Andrea Familari

Marco Donnarumma

Humane Methods (2019-present) is an ongoing project by Fronte Vacuo (Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere, Andrea Familari) that reflects on the new forms of violence emerging in algorithmic societies. The technological research for ℧R and ΣXHALE have been conducted at the Academy for Theater and Digitality and this page describes our research questions, workflow and findings in relation to these projects. Please note that this page does not discuss the theatre pieces we created in their entirety, but focuses only on the technological research that underpins those pieces. For further information about the aesthetic, conceptual and dramaturgical research behind these works please visit our website.

Humane Methods

AV (Audiovisual Design)

Lighting Design

How to depict violence in theatre?           

Without reproducing violence?
Without aestheticizing it?
Without trivializing it?
Without inflicting violence on others while trying to find answers?

>>>>>>> Thoughts and insights from this search <<<<<<<


In the beginning of 2023 there is this vague vision for a setup which gives me the freedom to experiment with different aspects of the depiction of violence:

a human-sized puppet | its digital face-double | a green screen studio

___________________________________________________________________________________________________


I knew right from the start that I want to work with a puppet.              Firstly, because I think that this is a logical approach to the question of how to depict violence in theatre without inflicting violence on others while trying to find answers. The puppet itself feels nothing. And since I am going to animate the puppet myself, I am autonomous - and bypass putting others in situations of violence.
But above all, I choose the puppet because I am obsessed with the effect it has on the viewer.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPECTATOR AND PUPPET

THE SPECTATOR`S (LIFE-BRINGING) GAZE
Although the puppet is obviously artificial (manufactured & dead), the subconscious draws a line from the viewer's body to the puppet's body and brings it to life. 

The uncanniness inherent in the puppet is partly due to its resemblance to humans.

THE PUPPET AS 'DESTROYER' OF THE BODY ORDER
This process creates a kind of feedback: we are thrown back on ourselves when looking at the puppet - the sight of it destroys the illusion of the perfect, complete body.

>>> The act itself is already a violent one.

>>> The phenomenon of the puppet lies in the bodily consternation it triggers in us.

What is the puppet's digital face-double?

I am driven by the idea to combine two components - analog theater work and digital innovation - to create a character that serves as a test subject for me in an attempt to research violence.
I asked myself how I could enhance the strange liveliness of the puppet.
Then I had the idea: what if the puppet can speak for itself?
What if I 3D-scanned the puppet's face and then animated it, let it talk?

The original goal at the time was to merge these two components - and create a hybrid character.
An analogue puppet with a digital face - united in one body within a video work.


By working in the green screen studio, I can put the puppet into different local contexts which gives me a endless freedom.
I´m wearing a green morphsuit so I can erase myself from the material.
The puppet moves as if by itself.

In the end, I want to have a character which is half analog and half digital puppet. It moves and speaks by itself, acts in different "worlds" - which consist of videos, images, different sounds and noises that I collect.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

What should the puppet I will be researching with look like?
Do I want to set a clear frame with its appearance? Prescribe interpretations?
What type of material do I want to use?
What must the puppet be able to do - how should it move?

//collaboration with puppeteer and puppet maker Emilien Truche


Since I've never built a human-sized puppet that can move like a human and be animated by just one person, I worked with a professional. Emilien was there to advise me (I had the ambition to really build the puppet myself). He was recommended to me by a friend who works at the 

.
His first questions were mainly about what postures the puppet should adopt and what expressions it should master. In order to be able to communicate more clearly with each other, I looked for sculptures, paintings, and photographs from the news and social media that tell a story of violence in their posture. 

//studying Sicilian puppet theatre - opera dei pupi


Before I applied for the fellowship, I had planned a short trip to Sicily in October. To study and research Sicilian puppet theater there.                   It was important to me to first study a traditional form of puppet theater intensively in order to incorporate what I had learned into my work. What do I take away from what I have seen? What do I explicitly want to do differently?                                                                                               The Sicilian tradition is one that I can experience and explore in life - although of course it is by no means the oldest form of puppetry (as it developed in the first half of the 19th century). A major component of the Opera dei Pupi is the violence: swordfights, tournaments and battles with monsters, sorceresses and enemies.
This research trip was really insightful and inspiring for my work on „Researching Violence“ - and perfect for this point in the work process. I had the chance to dive deep into the portrayal of violence through (traditional) puppet animation and to get involved with puppet making and puppetry.

I had the opportunity to see several performances, paying particular attention to the study of the gestures and postures of violence.

In addition, I was lucky to visit various studios. I was able to talk to the puppet makers themselves, ask questions and even try out the puppets myself and study them up close.
For example, when a character strikes with his sword, the opponent can be split in half, fall apart or lose his head. In the puppet maker's (Italian: oprante) workshop I was able to study the mechanisms and construction of the puppets at close quarters.

// building up my 'archive' (by collecting sounds, texts, interviews, images and video material of places)


From the very first day, I collected material for my archive for the experimental setup.
I was interested in building up a broad spectrum and I mainly used my iPhone for the documentation. Regardless of whether it was video recordings of
- places and spaces that are commonly associated with violence
or as a counterpart to it
- places and spaces that are commonly associated with peace
- I also tried to find 'neutral' places
- as well as places that I personally associate with violence and peace

examples of sound recordings I recorded:  

- Munich Central Station during the Oktoberfest
- bee colony in Düsseldorf
- shopping mall in Dortmund city center
- eerie sounds at night on the way home
- cicadas by the wayside in Palermo                                                             - sounds of the sword fight of the dolls in Sicily


- I was lucky to be able to attend a Blender workshop (by Elisabeth  Drache, 3D artist and a member of the duo The Ruhrgebieterinnen) at the Academy, which proved useful for the next steps in animating the 3D scan.

NOVEMBER+DECEMBER 2023// ANIMATION + COMPOSITION                         

At the beginning of November I took part in a motion and face capture workshop as part of the DIVE FESTIVAL OF IMMERSIVE ARTS (In cooperation with the Figurentheater-Kolleg Bochum). Irina Shutova and Warja Rybakova (both working for DOCKdigital BERLIN) drew my attention to the plug-in Faceit from Blender after I told them what I was planning to do with my puppet. The workshop also gave me a better idea of what I need to pay attention to when animating the handmade puppet in the green screen studio.

//animating the puppet in the green screen studio

3 days of intensive exchange, reviewing the video material, discussing.

WORKING THESES 
a) the puppet itself feels nothing
b) the puppet is not able to play in comparison to the actor or actress
>>> Which means e.g. that when an actor dies on stage, they are only pretending. This can still touch us, but we know that they don't really die. The puppet dies the moment it dies. Right before our eyes.<<<
c) the puppet is familiar to every human being and therefore accessible (in the sense of not elitist)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



With this first material of the human-animated puppet in the green screen in front of me, I began to go through my archive (with sounds, videos etc.) and experiment with putting the individual components together.


In order to be able to act as quickly and flexibly as possible, I worked with Final Cut. On the one hand, to be able to cut out the puppet with one click and, on the other, to be able to put my video and sound material together as simply as possible.                                                    At the same time I am working with Blender and the plug-in Faceit to animate the puppet´s face. Since I had hardly any Blender experience, I always used apps (with AI-based animation tools for faceplay and deep fake, like Tokking-Heads or Reface) in between to be able to check ideas quickly.


The composition of the individual parts allows contrasts to be created between the puppet's expression, physical movements, spoken text, sound and setting.
How do expressions of horror that really reach us come about?
When does empathy arise, when does alienation?

We have access to so many images of atrocities that the individual images lose their impact. My working hypothesis is that both a puppet and a completely artificial person (avatar) have the power to sensitize us as viewers to the experience of visual and linguistic violence. The puppet and the avatar feel nothing; we create their suffering, pain and exhaustion solely through our imagination. This creates a direct connection between the viewer and the representation.

// REALIZATION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
The days of trial and error made me rethink my approach completely.   

                                                                                                                      I had the feeling that - with everything I tried - I was aestheticizing. And thus trivializingviolence.


>> You can't depict violence without reproducing it in some way. <<

I also couldn't get out of the vicious circle of thinking that everything is just my personal view. How do I get to the point where something becomes more universal? To become a little more detached from myself and my feelings?

And who am I to talk about this?
What position do I have within the "narrative of violence"?

These doubts made me take a fresh look at the material I had collected - and think again in a different direction. 

new thoughts: The relationship between puppet and puppeteer is already a violent one in itself. There are clear power structures as to who controls whom.

Where does the relationship between puppet and puppeteer tilt?     

Hanna Rode

How can we tell about human abysses without reproducing or trivializing violence? This question is the starting point for an experiment with a handmade puppet and its digital face double.

Researching Violence

2023

I am interested in immersion, the "reality" part of Virtual Reality. As CyberRäuber, Marcel and I have tried and created various avenues into immersion. A very short summary of our findings would be that a high degree of immersion is generally not necessary to tell a story or to convey what you want to. And that immersion generally suffers if you aim for too much realism: the more you rely on your target's collaboration, their imagination and established social and cultural norms, the more they will get "into it". Participation / interaction trumps detail, trumps realism.

But of course, the more you let people interact, the more you lose the the ability to steer a narrative. In this dilemma we usually opted for limited realism (high aestheticization), limited interaction, a limited scope of character, space and time, and worldbuilding as a narrative strategy.



 as an idea manifested itself over the course of years. It basically grew on the compost of CyberRäuber's work in theatre, in which we usually didn't have the time, scope and resources - and more importantly - not the framing for such a project.



 aims to be maximally immersive with a given, limited technological effort, following an approach of a minimally detailled realism, maximal imagination and direct, personal contact.

Hundred thousands of years of evolution have led us to develop certain quirks that can help storytellers create compelling narratives, something that can also be ab-used, of course. Think about what we imagine in clouds, in the shadows of a forest lighted by flickering flames of a campfire. What kind of faces we see in objects, landscapes, moving leaves, what voices and sounds we hear in the wind. The less there is to see or hear, the more we augment; little impulses, visual or aural clues are launch pads for our imagination, something every horror movie, every mystery story told on a nightly walk makes use of.



One way of direct, personal contact is the human voice. It can supply content and - with language, dialect, wording, timbre and emotion - context. We ascribe very much to a voice that could only be safely verified by meeting and conversing with the person with this voice.
In this project, the means to deliver the voice will be a recording, a voice message. Why? Because it is a controlled way of communication. For the ordinary person an ordinary conversation is something that can be quickly understood and deciphered, the situation, the conversation partner can be assessed. We would normally aim to reduce mystery, to understand what is happening and only continue to engage with the person and the topic if intrigued and feeling save. A voice message instead can be mysterious, incomplete, poetic, out of the norm. It can also contain additional information, environmental sounds. A voice message can be dilligently tailor-made for a situation and our goals. It doesn't need and anyway couldn't deal with an instant reply. The communication here isn't a realtime dialogue, but an elusive conversation over a longer timespan, similar to an infrequent exchange of letters, including lost and/or overlapping messages.




Nevertheless the recipient has to have the feeling of being heard, of being reacted to. And as in any communication, truth and trust plays an important role...

During the fellowship different areas have to be explored:

Voice - characteristics, difference to simple text

AI - what can be done with artificial neural networks? Story, text to speech, speech to text...

Soundscape - binaural sound, artificial and recorded; AMSR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response)

The role of time (length, pace, intervalls,...)

As was to be expected, my research plan didn't survive contact with reality. I thought the main focus of my research would be on "Soundscape" and "Story". Instead, most of my time was spent on voice and specifically the creation of text and voice with neural networks, with timing and the delivery system of the messages (AdaptorEx, Telegram). 

"Soundscape" didn't play the expected role due to the realization that interaction with smartphones, the chosen device, is mainly happening visually, and when people listen to voice messages, they oftentimes don't use higher quality headphones and will be surrounded by other environmental audio. After creating and afterwards checking out some binaural and ASMR material on the phone it didn't seem relevant any more in the scope of this research. It is one of those engineering issues that can take a lot of time and are fun to work on, but ultimately don't deliver for an audience.

"Story" got deprioritized when I realized that neural networks, or more precisely large language models (LLM), would take over a large part of creating the narrative. 
Here maybe some further explanation is in order. As CyberRäuber, we've been working on AI in theatre since 2018. In our so-called "neural theatre"-pieces (Prometheus unbound, Linz 2019; Der Mensch ist ein Anderer, Wiesbaden 2021; Mensch am Draht, Ingolstadt 2022; The Merge, Bangalore 2023) we aim to unleash the creative power of generative AI. The text the actors speak and play is created in real time by LLMs and transmitted to in-ear speakers via text-to-speech. You could also call this a text-to-body-mechanic, the actors repeat and interpret what they hear and thereby embody the AI. The process works amazingly well. While still maintaining parts of improv theatre, this isn't improv because the actors follow the logic and emotional content of the texts. Actors can never lose focus, have to stay "on" all the time and are oftentimes visibly struggling with their task, because the text will always be new and unknown, its twists and turns unforeseen. This is fresh material! The audience on the other hand usually themselves struggle with the uncanniness of the whole set-up, try to follow what's happening on stage, enjoy the actors' struggle and they take on much more responsibility, because the play develops on stage and in their heads.

So, AI is already playing a crucial part in CyberRäuber's artistic methods, and we've been following the latest developments in the field on a daily basis. And with the current generation of LLMs (2023/24) we now actually possess very powerful storytelling tools. The question was: is one person alone capable of creating, editing, curating large amounts of coherent, stylistically appealing, sensible text? Can a network convincingly take on the role of a narrator? To check and ultimately prove this thesis became one of the main isssues of the research at ATD.


This documentation is an ongoing process and will grow as the fellowship progresses. Last entry: 30. November 2023

Björn Lengers

You just received another one of those mysterious audio messages that strangely overlay your surroundings and ask you to perform a seemingly insignificant action: to walk a little slower, to press the pedestrian lights even though you don't actually want to cross the street, something else. A voice wants you to believe that you are decisively changing the future.
- - - Resonance is an interactive, immersive and theatrical narrative, which can be experienced by many people independent of time and place on their smartphones.

Resonance

, is an artistic/methodological movement research. 

The aim of this research project is to take core principles of (analogue) puppetry animation and to translate them on the moving/dancing human body using motion capture techniques, in order to explore how this movement method can increase the experience of aliveness of 3D avatars, by making their movements more organic and establishing them as breathing/alive creatures.

I am inspired by, and draw upon my background as pluridisciplinary artist, with a focus on dance, movement, and puppetry/object theater. 

I'm interested in approaching 3D avatars as another form of body language with its specific dynamic and needs, which also implies other possibilities and limitations. For this language, the human body acts as the vector as well as a translator. The fundamental principles of puppetry animation are considerably different from the human way of moving regarding impulses, dynamics, rhythm, accentuation, tension, stop/echoes of the movements, etc. When these principles of puppetry are applied to the human body, and the resulting movements are used to animate an avatar, an act of translation occurs. It results in more precise movements and sequences, and the impression of ‘organic’ movement, because the avatars are established as ‘breathing’ and ‘alive’, which is the core of puppetry’s art.

You will find here the long interview about the Research and the Process itself:

{ More to come here, about the Process, the Whys, the Discovery }

As a showing from this research, ‘A_live, became a video installation on 3 canvases about those movements, impulses and breath, accompanied by live music.  

The setting is composed as follows: Movement sequences, recorded using motion capture techniques, are projected on the three canvases. The embodiment of this exploration is interpreted by three different avatars, each one with its own texture and characteristics. One avatar has a water texture, which has an ‘explosive’ capacity related to the strength and speed of the movement impulses. The second avatar is more ‘typical’: a humanoid shaped form, yet connected to a cloth which is reacting intricately and precisely to the avatar’s impulses, creating a ‘wind’ feeling as well as an extension of the breath’s embodiment. The third is made of particles which leave traces of light following each movement.

The emphasis of this visual experience is on the quality and precision of the movements, and the different impulses, explorations and nuances embodied by the avatars: How the different textures are reacting to those elaborated momentums, innovative way of moving and to the avatars breath are the leaders of this experience. Each texture with its respective features reacts in a different way to the impulses of the performer, creating various and specific visual echoes in harmony with one another. 

Thoughtful dramaturgical choices and precise editing creates an additional layer of choreography, from the timing of the appearance (and disappearance) of the sequences upon the canvases; the smoothness (and suddenness) of the transitions; the synchronicities and delays between the sequences which underline the specificity of the each movement or breath. We are invited to witness each avatar’s individual breath as well as experiencing a collective organic entity as it moves and breathes as one.

The animation’s cameras are connected to the pelvis of the avatars, which is to say, to the core of the movements. In fact, it is important to note that absolutely no extra effects were added, and there was no need at the end to clean the files. The cleanliness of the movements, and the possibility overall to use ‘raw’ files in this way, are the direct results of the method I’ve explored and developed. 

Although this showing is the first creative response to my research; the frame became not only an explicative presentation of the project so far, but an immersive installation in its own right. It was important to me to create a unified, elaborate setting, and to invite the audience to feel immersed in an atmospheric ‘island’: connecting with senses, finesse of movements, beauty, breath and ultimately a deep exploration of aliveness through external bodies.

                        If you wish to discover more about the installation itself, I invite you to consult the project description on my website. *

Concept, Movement Research, Embodiment: 


Baris Pekcagliyan / @0bapek
Beka Tcharbadze / @bekaarba
Alptuğ Çavuş / @talkingrocks

Warm thanks to the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, 
Mario Simon,
& KOPRODUKTIONSLABOR.

Laura Waltz

My fellowship project 'A_live' is an artistic/methodological movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'organicness' and feeling of 'aliveness' of avatars through animation fundamentals from puppetry.


The aim of this research is to take core principles of (analogue) puppetry animation and to translate them on the moving/dancing human body using motion capture techniques, in order to explore how this movement method can increase the experience of aliveness of 3D avatars, by making their movements more organic and establishing them as breathing/alive creatures.

A_live

Motion Capture/Tracking

Avatars

In 2014, Ian Goodfellow and his team published their ground breaking idea of 

, and since than many exciting works were done with this idea.

A typical GAN consists of a Generator and a Discriminator. A Generator would generate “fake” data while the Discriminator will try to distinguish between “real” and “fake” data, and we could compare that to an art forger and an art historian/expert. The GAN are usually constructed in way so that when we proceed with the training, both the Generator and the Discriminator would get better at their job. Computer scientist has developed different metrics to measure the performance of the network they developed. Once the trained network get to an optimal point, the would stop the training, and the trained Generator could then be used to generate realistic looking data.

 has listed a lot of different projects that people have been exploring with GAN. The myth and the promise to create something that doesn't exist before is very intriguing, that's how we decided to start our exploration with the GAN network. And we decided to start with a very popular network called the “Stylegan”.

 is first proposed and published by a team of researchers working in Nvidia in 2018. Since then the team continues to make improvement and created stylegan2, whereas there are official implementation created by Nvidia to support training in 

, which is a popular AI software library researchers use these days. The latest version is 

. For all these years Stylegan remains to be the state of the art network for generating realistic looking images.

Since the GAN are said to be able to create something that don't exist, we are wondering what would happen if we train the network with a theatrical images. The idea is to start with some time lapse pictures of a single production and see if it could generate a “look” that never happen in that production.

So we have the idea, but how should we implement that? How do we use those networks? What kind of hardware is needed? Do we train the network locally or online? These are all issues that take us sometime to figure out.

Stylegan3 is not yet published when we started the fellowship in September 2021, so we actually began with Stylegan2. If we look at the requirements on 

, it said this: “1–8 high-end NVIDIA GPUs with at least 12 GB of memory. We have done all testing and development using NVIDIA DGX-1 with 8 Tesla V100 GPUs”. While this sound pretty normal for big tech company like Nvidia, for other institutions this might not be something that to be accessed easily. And the 

 time is rather long. For example training a picture of 1024 X 1024 up to 25000 kimg will take 46days with only one V100 GPU. Usually the training happens locally with powerful computer and graphics card, but before we committed to such local training and request the related resources, we've explored some training online.

Below are the training results using Runway ML. The picture datasets are the time lapse photos from 3 different productions. There are different training settings and we have used transferred training provided by the Runway ML.

Twelfth Night/15000 Steps/pretrained “landscape” model)

Death of Yazdgerd/10000 Steps/pretrained “illustration” model

The Seagull/10000 Steps/pretrained “illustration” model

From a distance, these generated videos look pretty “real”. But when we look closer, they are of course missing a lot of details in comparison to those original “real” pictures. We discovered that no matter what size pictures we upload, Runway ML will 

. And this leaves us no choice but to explore the option of local training, so that we have more control over the training and can see if that would benefit the network we wish to train.

We started our local training on a window laptop with an external GPU (Nvidia RTX 2080ti), which only has 11GB video memory. At that time styglegan3, which gives you more option to control how much video memory you use, was not available.

We managed to install the software needed on the laptop and start the training. However, the training will stop randomly whenever the computer running out of video memory. So for a while we have to check the status of training everyday, and when it stops we would just have to restart the training. We discovered that this phenomenon is mostly related to the process of metrics calculation that needs more memory. Once we have disabled that the training become more stable, but it will still stop from time to time. This is why we also started to explore other online options for more stable training.

After some research on the internet, we discovered that many people are doing their experiment on 

Colab is an online linux & python-based programming platform that meant to be used interactively, meaning that originally it wasn't designed to be used for long time training. Compared to running things locally, it saves time and perhaps hard drive space to create many virtual environment, and you could test your code quickly with a Chrome Browser. Of course there are 

 of such a service. With the free version you could only run the code when your browser is active, and even for paid Pro+ version your code will only run for 24 hours from the first execution.

The benefit of training on Colab is however you will get GPU that are more than 12GB, which means you will be able to run the training without any memory issues. There are many colab notebook that researchers share online, and it's quite straight forward to use them once you copy them into your own google drive. An example is the 

 made by Derrick Schultz, where he has also modified the code for his own interests. We did some training on various dataset with the notebook, below is the results of the “Twelfth Night” dataset.


Since we are now running the software on appropriate GPU and with 1024 X 1024 resolution, we are getting better results. But if we look closer a lot of details are still lost. This is probably because there are too few pixels for the network to understand the features of the performer/costume fully. One thing to notice is this production is almost a single scenery production, and the ceiling is always there. Apparently the network are catching the features of the ceiling and other fixed elements pretty well.

The software package also allows us to create interpolation video:

From text to music, from picture to video, different tools of Artificial Intelligence have already been used in art making. Could AI also be applied to theatre making, particularly theatrical design, which is a more complex “problem” for the machine?

Coming from a theatrical design background, the research team (Elena Tilli and Samuel Chan) would like to explore if these AI tools could “assist” in theatrical design.

RESEARCH PLATFORM

Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Machine Learning in Artistic Production

Meredith Thomas

Artificial Intelligence Interactive Sensors Installation
completedFellowship

Summary
During my fellowship I embarked on a practice-led programme to explore a range of applications of ML in a series creative projects. Many of these projects stem from existing collaborations with performers, choreographers, dancers, media artists and programmers.

Similar Projects

Machine Learning in Artistic Production

Meredith Thomas

Artificial IntelligenceInteractiveSensorsInstallationcompletedFellowship

SummaryDuring my fellowship I embarked on a practice-led programme to explore a range of applications of ML in a series creative projects. Many of these projects stem from existing collaborations with performers, choreographers, dancers, media artists and programmers.

Similar Projects

Artificial Intelligence Interactive Sensors Installation
completedFellowship

Summary
During my fellowship I embarked on a practice-led programme to explore a range of applications of ML in a series creative projects. Many of these projects stem from existing collaborations with performers, choreographers, dancers, media artists and programmers.