Curtain Road in Shoreditch will soon be the site of a new Shakespeare museum, a visitor experience that transports the guests back to the 1590s when Mr. Chamberlain’s men organized people like Romeo and Juliet and Henry V.
But before that, the creative director raised in Finchley, Matthew Maxwell, will organize something rich and strange, an installation based on AI inspired by Shakespeare’s words, in what he would have birthday.
Q: When and where do we see your art work?
TO: The installation opens in 55 Curtain Road on April 23 and extends until the end of the week. It is an immersive environment that is somewhere between the theater, the video installation and the algorithmic dream landscape.
Q: What were your inspirations?
A: The project presents the image power of generative artificial intelligence (Genai) to the words of William Shakespeare. Text, topics and letters written or interpreted in the years 1597-99- When the poet lived and worked in the London district of Shoreditch-use as indications in a creative cybernetic process to create video, sound and images.
Q: How did AI help create the work of art?
A: AI was less a tool and more a collaborator. I used large language models and image generators to generate fragments of scripts, images and space motifs. Unlike traditional techniques, this introductory unpredictability. It is a dialogue between me and the machine, or produce results that surprise me. You are not ‘programming’ a work of art, you are cultivating one.
A: It is immersive in the sense that it surrounds and implies the viewer. Instead of looking from the outside, you are inside a changing landscape of sound, image and text. He asks you to look more deeply in the peculiar magic than certain places have. Shoreditch is one of the themes.
Q: What are your background and how did you do the job?
A: I am an artist and researcher based in London who works at the intersection of creative AI, performance and media theory. This piece evolved from my doctorate at the Middlex University, where I have been exploring what it means to create with machines, not just use them as tools. Do not ask “can it be creative?” But “what does it mean to create with non -human intelligence?”
Q: What do you expect viewers to get it?
TO: A change in perspective. A soft disturbance. An encounter with the strange cognition, human and machine, as something tangled, not opposite. Identally delay as a dream, you are half memory.
Something rich and strange for Matthew Maxwell extends at age 55, Curtain Road Shoreditch from April 23 to 27.
