Artificial intelligence is all over this year’s Fringe, from a classical concert composed by ChatGPT to an installation where a bot will predict your future. Elisabeth Gunawan’s Stampin’ in the Graveyard and Alfrun Rose’s Dead Air are shows offering more poignant examinations of this quickly evolving technology by exploring its capacity to let the dead live on. Neither theatremaker used AI in the making of their show, but both grapple with why, as humanity, we might want to build such a macabre tool.
Stampin’ in the Graveyard began life in 2020 as a concept album performed as a digital theatre piece on a Zoom-like platform. In that earlier incarnation, the audience members watching at home were asked to close their eyes and just listen to the poems and music. By using headphones designed for silent disco in this in-person version at Summerhall, Gunawan is hoping to create a similar sensibility. “I wanted to go back to this feeling that we had when everybody was listening in their own living rooms,” she explains. “The intimacy of that but also the feeling of being invited to go into yourself.”
Gunawan will take audiences on a choose-your-own-adventure-style journey that tells the story of a chatbot who’s trying to make sense of her creators in a post-apocalyptic world. “This piece of AI has been left for so long that she’s learned how to animate the space,” explains Gunawan. “She’s taken over the projection screen and sound, and she’s trying to figure out the meaning of her existence in this new paradigm. To do that, she goes through the human memories that are stored inside her, and through those memories, we encounter past characters.”
Dead Air, meanwhile, is set in the here and now, and concerns a young woman using an AI app to “resurrect” the father she’s recently lost. The idea was inspired when Rose’s own father died, and a younger cousin messaged her to say he’d come to him in a dream. She was furious. “I was like, ‘Why did dad come to you and not to me?’” She also thought that if an afterlife did exist, her father would want nothing to do with it out of principle. “He was such an atheist that even if there was life after death, he would be too stubborn to come back.”
Rose was curious, though, and went down a rabbit hole online exploring how AI is being used today to bring back people’s loved ones. “I found this one Japanese show about a woman who’d lost her seven-year-old kid,” she recalls, “and they had built this VR experience for her based on videos of the child. It was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen.” When the woman attempted to hug her daughter, all she found was air. But even more unsettling was the child’s behaviour. “[The mother] said it was lovely seeing her daughter and hearing her voice again, but what was uncomfortable was she wasn’t behaving like her child. She was too docile, too well-behaved.”
That’s the problem with resurrection, as explored in everything from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: what comes back isn’t always what you expect. “When you resurrect someone using AI, which version of them are you resurrecting?” asks Rose. “Is it from when they died? Or from earlier when they weren’t ill? Or is it from when they were young? There is no definitive version of a person.”
Gunawan has a theory as to why we’re so hellbent on perfecting AI: “We’ve created these potentially very dangerous machines that are trained on everything humans created, and what we’ve ended up with is machines that incessantly try to talk to us and have a relationship with us, because chatbots are always trying to figure out what you want from them. This to me, makes them the mirror that humans want so badly.”
I suggest to Gunawan that another great mirror to humanity is theatre, of course. “You’re right,” she says. “And maybe that’s what gave me the safety to approach this complex subject of AI, because theatre, at its heart, is so human.”
Stampin’ in the Graveyard, Summerhall, 31 Jul-25 Aug (not 11, 18), 12.15pm
Dead Air, Pleasance Courtyard, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 11), 11.40am