What it means to be human, to learn, to remember, to accumulate knowledge, and act on that is at the heart of a new play from writer and director Bruce Barton.
Reset, running for five nights at Contemporary Calgary, asks audiences what it means to be human versus AI, all while asking them to determine who among the cast is portraying a human with the others as machines.
The twist is that even the actors themselves don’t know from night to night.
“What the audience is largely invited to do is to pay super close attention, make analysis, make speculations, try to figure out which way we’re heading, and then really ride it with us as the actors determine which direction we’re heading in,” said Barton.
“It’s not a pick your own adventure or that type of thing. It’s not like people put up their hands and we go this direction as opposed to that direction. But it is one in which the level of subtlety that the performers are bringing to it, and the tiny little indications as to which direction we’re heading are what we’re inviting the audience to engage with.”
That title, Reset, has a lot to do with both what is happening from evening to evening, but also in a more general sense of how machines and humans engage with their recollections over time.
In the case of machines, said Barton, there is a luxury of having to only remember information for a specific point in time and being able to carry forward without it when it is no longer needed.
Humans, he said, have a very different way of engaging with memory.
“We know that for human memory we never actually remember our particular event or a particular experience,” he said.
“We always remember that event or experience through all the other experiences we’ve had since. We’re constantly reformulating our memory and constantly reframing the experiences that we’ve had through the lens of those of our experiences.”
How the actors engage with the fragments of information that they have been given determines, at the end of the evening, who is human and who is not.
“It’s much more difficult for an individual human being to reset than it is for an artificial intelligence to,” said Barton.
Working with Reset‘s cast of Braden Griffiths, Jamie Konchak, Julie Orton, and Mike Tan to bring the piece to life was a joy, said Barton.
“I don’t think it’s hyperbole or just flattery that they speak a lot about their excitement about the project, because it is such a different experience. It really asks them to call upon their training, their experience, their personalities and their lives in an integrated way that very few sort of performing opportunities do,” he said.
“These folks have been part of this process throughout its development. They contributed writing which has been reformed and reformulated and woven into the performance itself. So their lives are part of this performance, and so there’s no question this is the finest room of performers maybe I’ve ever had to work with.”
A prescient idea then and even more so now
When Reset began as an idea back in 2017 between Barton and his collaborating team, the world was a very different place.
Barton told On Cue Calgary that at the time he was doing a lot of research into machine learning and the ways it had just begun to encroach into the public consciousness.
Fast forward nearly a decade and the technology has achieved mass ubiquity.
“AI is something that’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue and then the tip of everybody’s fingers, like people are engaging with it in so many ways, ways that they’re aware of and ways that they’re not aware of,” said Barton.
“When we turned around and finally got ourselves into a situation after the pandemic to get [Reset] on its feet, my initial thought was, ‘well, has our best buy date already passed?’ And what we realized relatively quickly is that the piece is only more relevant now than it was when it was first created.”
That audiences are even more aware of what AI is and how it affects them only makes the work that much more relevant, said Barton.
“I think in many ways, the industries that are making use of it the most are working really hard to make it sort of as invisible and as inconspicuous as possible. And one of the things about the piece is about bringing back that conversation,” he said.
“The piece is not dystopian, and it’s not really some sort of a hardcore science fiction piece. Really, we’re making use of the ubiquitous nature of artificial intelligence in our world now as a way to bring our focus back to what it means to be human.”
Reset is a production of Sage Theatre in association with Vertical City.
Performances of Reset run from March 18 through March 22 at Contemporary Calgary.
For more details and tickets, see sagetheatre.com.
