Karen Getz’s AI Project
June
Karen Getz’s AI Project
Karen Getz's AI Project is a comic-actors ballet about the developing world of humanoid robots. Set in a warehouse of rejected robots and robot parts, we follow the story of one human and his four emotionally intelligent machines. The idea for the project came when Getz's 11 year old daughter showed her footage from the Hanson Robotics Lab of several strikingly "human" robots. Hanson, and leading humanist robotic engineers across the globe, are creating biologically-inspired robots that mirror the behavior of people. This is a new generation of robotic engineering that is able to mimic not just movement, or even emotion, but eye contact, face recognition, and naturalistic spoken conversation. Research for the project has already been underway for over a year. Getz spent time at Hanson Robotics in Dallas observing AI robots under construction, at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute exploring the history of the field and recent advances, and at the MIT Museum working with their collection. As these scientists explore what it means to be human, they tackle the question from both a scientific and artistic perspective.
*The AI Project was funded by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Theater Initiative and an Interdisciplinary Professional Development Grant.
Conception-Choreography-Direction Karen Getz
