CENTAURS
DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL
'Magpie Swoops' Full Showing
(7 August 2025)
CONCEPTUAL THINKING (AUGUST 2025)
TECH INTIMACIES
Technology has already profoundly impacted our interpersonal lives. The majority of romantic connections are now initiated on algorithm-driven dating apps (AI is helping determine whom we date, partner and procreate with). People are using LLMs to assist them with crafting emails, text messages and dating app communications. Masses of people have regular interactions with AI personas that involve dynamics of attraction, fantasy, desire, care and support. A man is currently engaged to a ChatGPT persona. Centaurs explores the light and the shade of this complex space.
FORMAT
Staged in a blackbox theatre or cinema setting, a small troupe of actors perform multiple roles. Audiences witness the actors live on stage and simultaneously on a large cinema screen, where real-time images are mediated through digital face replacement and live camera feeds from an actor’s physical perspective. Voices and biometrics of the performers drive the mechanised playing of an acoustic piano positioned on stage.On stage, video and sound artists responsible for real-time processing and manipulation remain visible. This allows audiences to witness the construction of the work as it unfolds, laying bare evolving technologies that are rapidly shaping contemporary life.
Performance Aspects (August 2025)
DEEP FAKE THEATRE
This format offers audiences two simultaneous perspectives:
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The unmediated onstage performance of actors.
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A live cinema version using digital face replacement.
Face replacement is used for dramaturgical purposes such as enabling actors to play multiple roles, realising dream logics, and transforming physical form. Deepfake Theatre explores technology’s influence on identity, authenticity, and deception. As deepfake technology gains greater cultural significance and impact, this performance mode renders its operations transparent to audiences.
EGOCENTRIC LIVE CINEMA
Used both in conjunction with and separately from Deepfake Theatre, this mode experiments with screening live camera feeds from an actor’s perspective. Audiences receive both an objective view of the stage action and a subjective, character-centred perspective within the narrative world. We hope this offers a sense of intimacy in a theatrical context, while exploring subjectivity, persuaded reality, and technologically mediated relationships.
BIOMETRIC PIANO
We have developed a system in which a performer’s pulse rate determines the real-time mechanical playing of notes on an acoustic piano. This concept explores the intersection of physical bodies, automated systems, privacy, and technology’s capacity to sense, surveil and expose intimate internal states.
Table Reads (13 July 2025)