The Blurring Test
The Blurring Test
Music composed and performed by Varispeed:
Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, Aliza Simons
Libretto, concept and design by Peggy Weil
June 18th @ 8pm
at Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn NY 11217
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Can you convince your computer you are human? Varispeed performs a new song cycle based on The Blurring Test: Conversations with the online chatbot MrMind on what it means to be human.
From 1998 through 2014, an online chatbot named MrMind administered The Blurring Test, asking simply, “Can you convince me that you are human?” The sixteen years of online conversations, from all over the world, form a human chorus proclaiming our vision of ourselves during a time of significant transition in the relationship between humans and machines. Can you convince your computer you are human?
This new song-cycle is a musical adaptation of the texts by Peggy Weil based on transcripts from conversations between MrMind and humans from around the globe. This suite of eleven songs is scored for voices, electronics and instruments, utilizing the composers’ aesthetic diversity: (opera, art song, folk song, improvisation, synth and drone music, and movement) to highlight the breadth of conversations with MrMind.
Varispeed, working across genres and performance styles, approach this critically important topic through Peggy Weil’s libretto and decades of transcripts. This evening-length concert will be accompanied by projected text compiled and designed by Peggy Weil.
Peggy Weil, a Los Angeles based artist, initiated The Blurring Test as a global conversation on humans and machines in 1998. The website, MrMind.com was one of the very early examples of net art and perhaps the first to employ a working bot. Her libretto is compiled from sixteen years (unprecedented longevity for digital art) of transcripts representing the current, and as yet unfolding, story of our relationship with machines. She has exhibited widely including The Climate Museum in NYC and LACMA in LA.
Roulette Intermedium is a performing arts and new music venue located in Brooklyn, New York City. Founded in 1978, it has been located in the neighborhoods of Tribeca and SoHo in Manhattan, and now resides in a renovated theater in downtown Brooklyn.
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