SAINT JUDE ★★★★
SWAMP MOTEL

Since the launch of the Open AI Chatgpt in November you may have seen lots of debate about how Artificial Intelligence is coming for your job and will change the world. Well, now it’s here, and it’s coming for your night out first. 

Swamp Motel makes immersive experiences, the most visceral of theater genres. They plunge you into worlds that make demands on all your senses. If AI can colonize this it really can claim to be paradigm-shifting. Based on tonight’s press night, the hype is real.

The initial conceit is that ‘Saint Jude is the world’s first organization that allows you to communicate with people trapped in lifelong, irreversible comas. Using cutting-edge technology you’ll be able to talk to ‘Sleepers’ – hopeless coma patients lost to the depths of unconsciousness. Saint Jude’s innovative software translates the Sleeper’s brain patterns into speech in a split second allowing you to communicate with them directly in a coma

What the audience experiences are arriving at a nondescript office in Petty France with all the hallmarks of an under-resourced medical institution, halfway between bureaucracy and private enterprise. So far so very NHS. You are there as a volunteer to help ease the angst of coma patients by being their guide and comforter in their dark semi-conscious state. Parked in front of a less-than-state-of-the-art interface your role is to ask and answer questions, in an authentic and benevolent way.

There follows a Choose Your Own Adventure style interaction with the coma patient via the interface. What is special, and disconcerting, is the quality of the interaction. Swamp Motel has partnered with a technology provider who can interact moment to moment in an authentic way while using their own theatrical skills to impose a human story arc that has all the required dramatic elements of tension, conflict, pathos and urgency.

The experience is emotionally, physically and intellectually satisfying. A psychological thriller that at some moments will have you pounding at the keyboards, singing into the mic, playing shoot ’em-up video games, and hunting for clues whilst questioning the hegemony of surveillance capitalism. Yet barely moving from your seat in a grim, call center-type cubicle. 

The experience is not yet perfected, The ghost of Alexa haunts the AI’s emotional inflection. But Swamp Motel has incorporated that unnerving disembodiment into the drama. It is an hour-long experience in general, though elastic for each individual participant, which nicely balances the limits of its technological novelty with good old storytelling.

 

Experience Saint Jude while you can!
Limited run 16 Jan – 12 Mar 23
https://saintjude.ai/

 

 

Review by ANDREW HEBDEN

Queerguru Contributing Editor ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing, and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement, he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre, and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day.