25.4.2025

Antero Kemppi and Jere Kolehmainen carried out preliminary work for their piece Long Play during a residency at the Theatre Museum in January 2025. The space used was the Theatre Museum’s Maneesi.

Long Play is an audiovisual stage work created with the help of artificial intelligence, exploring the structures of friendship.

During the first two weeks of the residency, the team focused mainly on creating the text and dramaturgy. Kolehmainen and Kemppi drew inspiration for the text and the form of the piece from their shared history, especially their youthful experiences in bands. They have known each other for over twenty years.

All blog photos by Antero Kemppi.

We reflected on how to build a performance with two designers and what our relationship to the stage and audience would be. The idea was that we would somehow be physically part of the work, not as performers, but on some other performative level. As the residency progressed, we came up with the idea that the main characters would be actual band instruments, such as drums and guitar, engaged in dialogue with each other. This would also distance our personal presence in the work and give us more freedom regarding the theme.

We were interested in exploring how we could use AI in generating text and what kind of material it would produce. We started by feeding the AI memories from our personal experiences and instructed it to create a narrative from those memories. We used several different AI programs and made them interact with each other. After many iterations, we obtained fascinating text material. The programs did not merely combine the inputs but created new material that was not part of the original prompts. It is intriguing how AI constructs an alternative reality and history from our own memories. Our memories are highly fragmented and unreliable. It is interesting to see how AI tries to fill the gaps and create a coherent and believable story.

The dramaturgical form and stage solutions began to take shape during the residency. The performance will partly operate on a narrative level and partly on a more general level, where the structures of friendship are examined through facts. The so-called “scientific text” was produced by AI, which sparked discussions about today’s alternative facts and ways of obtaining reliable information.

During the latter weeks of the residency, we moved the text toward concreteness. We created characters and a storyline with AI assistance and made the band instruments perform. We built speakers from the instruments using various “shakers,” enabling the instruments to speak. Around the dialogues, we opened up glimpses of the future sound and music world of the performance. Through several variations in scene order, we found a structure suitable for the demo and programmed the form for the demo. At the end of the residency, we held a public demo of the work on January 29, 2025.

The residency was a good starting point for the project. Concrete stage events began to emerge, and the aesthetics of the performance became clearer.

Helsinki, April 22, 2025
Antero Kemppi and Jere Kolehmainen

This is an artificial intelligence translation from Finnish.