. So, . . . and of course welcome and thank you for being here this afternoon. In the next talk we have a combination of music artist and visual artist. It is something that we value in Sonar Más D.
We give a lot of things that we see in the stage. In the stage we also like to visualize it here, in the stage of Más D. and let's explain what happens behind the scenes. There are things that you can see at the stages of the festival. The music is going on, the visuals are going on.
Sometimes it's very difficult to tell apart what's the driving force, if it's the music or if it's the image. Today we have a perfect combination of musician and visual artist. Here we have Lawrence Leck. He is a visual artist, he is a sculptor, and he calls himself a simulation artist. And then Steve Goodman, Code9, DJ, producer, label owner. And the session will be presented and conducted by journalist specializing in music, Lisa Blanning. So please welcome our guest today. Thanks, everybody, for coming.
Oh, sorry, I was just going to say, we're going to just show a trailer for the No Tell, which is the performance that Steve and Lawrence are going to be presenting tomorrow. so
So, I think that first First off, maybe we should, you can probably tell from the trailer that you saw that there's a, the no tell is a very specific idea. Steve, first off, maybe you and Lawrence can give the audience a really brief description
of the performance in the no tell. Sure. Is this on? Yeah. The Notel is a fully automated luxury hotel that we, that Lawrence built and designed as a visual accompaniment to my album, Nothing, that came out at the end of last year. So as I'm playing the music live, Lawrence is navigating using a video games controller. navigating around this virtual architecture. Do you want us to go into the concept of the no tell? Well, what I do want to know is
about the stages of conceptualizing nothing, the album, into this live performance. Because the artwork for the album, nothing, which came out the latter half of last year, is tied to the no tell. So when you first started working on the record, did you already have the concept in mind? And at what point did the imagery start to come in? No, when I first started working on the record, I had nothing in mind. That was the main concept for the album. And then as I was in the studio working on the music, I was reading a lot at the same time. I was reading a lot about zeros in mathematics, voids and vacuums in physics and quantum physics,
and certain ideas in economics to do with automation and zero marginal cost economies and so on. And then very close to finishing the album, Lawrence got in touch with Hyperdub to ask if we wanted any visuals done for any music projects. And because the zeros and voids and vacuums were at the heart of the music, when Lawrence sent his stuff over, particularly when he sent over a piece of his called Unreal Estate, I noticed that all of his visual work was based around these kind of evacuated, empty simulations of neoliberal architecture.
So very quickly it was clear that it was a perfect fit. So just towards the end of the music production process, we started to collaborate. We got some of the ideas for the artwork. Actually, Manny Optogram did the cover. So there was some collaboration between the three of us. And then the inside artwork of the LP and the CD was done by Lawrence. Gotcha. Okay. And Lawrence, you actually trained as an architect. And a lot of your work virtualizes existing structures into video game-esque spaces. spaces. The Notel is a fictional space, but a friend pointed out at your performance last
week in Berlin that there were a few specific architectural homages in the piece. And Unreal Estate, of course, is actually based on the Royal Academy in London. So what are some of the few architectural spaces that people might be able to spy in the Notel? I think well first of all I got Really interested in the idea of constructing a space without physically building anything and also What certain reference points are so for example in a hotel? It's basically like What would a future hotel be like that? Relates both like aesthetically to ideas of nothing or this kind of like closed loop system
Which is literally visible in the structure and also So in this scenario, where instead of buying luxury objects like watches, phones, cars and so on, you actually upgraded that idea to actually buy design classics from architecture. So one of the suites in this where SpaceApe is in, this track, it's the Barcelona Pavilion. So obviously the Barcelona Pavilion was built in Barcelona, and it has a really interesting history itself, you know because what is I think actually quite close by here now it's like 15 minutes walk away it's a replica of the original and the original Barcelona pavilion was kind of denounced by the
Nazi government as like degenerate architecture and then it went through this really weird tour around the world as a stage set for different ideologies so anyway that Barcelona pavilion is kind of my model in a way for this like functionless space because it's a pavilion just built to be looked at and to be walked around but in the no tell that's just one of the luxury suites that there there are so that's probably like the most obvious like sample that I've taken and there's other elements like it recurs throughout like actually three times in the in the building once is as this kind of spa for where the space ape and his hologram still live and
another one is where DJ Rashad and his MRI machine exist so there's different ideas about not just that it's this evacuated neoliberal architecture but also that the future the future memory of people is somehow embedded in this place that's also a non-place as a kind of like Mark or Jay like geography would theorize about this place but somehow there's a place so anonymous but there's still so many memories embedded in it that people might not get. Okay there's so much to unpack here. First off I love this idea about architectural space used as a vehicle for ideology. And let's talk about the idea of fully automated luxury communism
because this is key to the no-tell, isn't it? Maybe, do you want to give a brief breakdown? If you haven't heard yet, Steve, I think you should probably explain first what the idea of fully automated luxury communism is. Well, the phrase fully automated luxury communism is coined by a London-based journalist, political journalist called Aaron Bastani. He runs this alternative media platform called Novara Media. So fully automated luxury communism is based on the idea that instead of trying to protect jobs from the process of automation, which has been unfolding for the last 100 years,
at least, we should encourage the full automation of human labor. And by doing that, explore what humans can do without being forced to work. Usually it goes alongside things like universal basic income. What are humans going to do when they don't have any work? They can't earn any money. You give everyone in this society free money. So it has a lot in common with other recent political theoretical movements, particularly left accelerationism.
So the relationship of that to the no-tell is kind of, it's based on a, the no-tell is based on a conceit of what would happen if this idea of fully automated luxury communism was appropriated by a Chinese luxury hotel brand and turned into a chain of hotels for Chinese oligarchs and the kind of rich Chinese elite. So it's kind of based on this initial misinterpretation of the idea. And it's also kind of the other thing that goes alongside fully automated luxury communism is the idea of a society of abundance. You know, we have more than enough of everything.
There's no longer scarcity, luxury, abundance, and so on. So the other conceit of the no-tell is that yes, we do have no scarcity of goods and services, but in the no-tell there is scarcity of one important thing and that's humans. So it's fully automated. What you see in the no-tell is a world populated by drones and the drone's no longer in the service of humans. So you follow the drone through the notel, rather like a kind of wildlife documentary, as the drone seeks out his fellow drones or its fellow drones
and attempts to liberate them because the drones are no longer subjected or enslaved to human desire. So there's a few things going on. Yeah. Okay, well, let's start with one of the simplest ones. Going back to Unreal Estate, this work of Lawrence's was particularly chilling because it was also, it felt like a pointed critique of the 1%. And why that is, is in the piece, Lawrence reimagines the Royal Academy as bought by some oligarch billionaire.
And there is a narrative which is lifted straight out of the pages of Tatler, right? Yeah. So there's an accompanying narrative that actually exists. And that narrative is about how you should handle your staff if you're a billionaire. So would you say that the political, perhaps even anti-capitalist angle is important for you? Because it seems to be like this political edge is recurring in your work. Yeah, I think it's, in my work, it's kind of actually pro-capitalist as much as it's anti-capitalist. In the Royal Academy one, I actually, half of it was critique and half of it was pure
fantasy because in a way it's like that subjectivity you get from fiction or a film you know I would actually like to be in a position where I could live in somewhere like that but at the same time because I can't then of course I make this like satirical ironic work about it I think the difference is with this because we're projecting into firstly we're projecting into a future yeah and Secondly, we're projecting into this strange utopia where in a world without work, everything becomes leisure. But of course, there's something chilling about that in terms of automation, in terms of the actual environment and economy that humanity would have to live in in order to have this kind of building.
I think the other thing is that the architecture of this building as well is kind of based on the new Apple headquarters in one Apple loop Cupertino, which is, I mean, it's a R&D facility, which is this perfect loop, which is meant to embody different ideas of, you know, kind of transparency, non-hierarchical organization for this company that aspires to, I guess, recreate the world. in its own design hyper designed image so again it's like it's a critique of things but I'm using the exact same tools that are produced by these companies so of course I'm aware of the certain kind of complicity in that but that's also
one idea behind accelerationism you know is that if you want to rather than rather than kind of stopping systems through revolution you stop things through participation and trying to undermine things through their own logic. But it's more complex than just kind of critique in one sense. Well, you bring up how complex it is to hold certain ideologies and yet also exist in the modern world, which is an important point to make. One of the things, the touches I really liked about the performance is I really like the bit where the screens within the screens are showing loops of what look like commercials for cosmetics.
And the track from the album that's being played at that time is called Mirage. And that seems especially relevant given the extent of that industry in a place like Korea and the proliferation of plastic surgery in that country. Was that on purpose? Well definitely, I mean, you know, we touched briefly upon the fact that there's this Chinese luxury company that's been created. But I think what's interesting is the idea of like Orientalism, but not Western Orientalism kind of fantasizing about the East, but actually like Eastern Orientalism like Shiseido Cosmetics, which is where those ads are taken from, where it's kind of like the Korean or Japanese or Chinese vision of itself.
and in an indirect way that's also to place things on a subtle level in the future in this kind of like the specter of you know Asia taking over in terms of the economy and things like that but definitely this idea of yeah cosmetics the luxury industry and this strange fusion of Orientalism and commercialism at the same time is kind of tied in together but tied in specifically to the track that's called Mirage. Exactly. Okay, yeah. Are there other moments, planned moments in the performance like that that are... Really come together. Yeah, that I might have missed? Every room. Come on, Lisa, you need to watch closer. Your glasses and pink.
Yeah, the way we started was kind of, apart from the architecture, the surrounding architecture which frames it all, The idea was to do a room for each track. So the track No-Tel is the lobby. Track Hollow is the hollow suite. Respirator is the medical room, where you see the MRI or the CAT scanner, whatever it is. The track Zero Work is where you descend into the industrial basement, the industrial dungeon of the No-Tel. The vacuum packed is at a piano bar, which has this infinite automated piano.
So every, more or less every room. Does tie into a specific track. Sorry, but yeah, sometimes it's ambiguous because whether there's like a visual cue and an audio one. So for example, you hear this like piano keyboard sample, then you see a piano. where sometimes you hear, for example with the third ear transmission, you hear a voice and then you turn a corner, then you see a hologram. So, kind of like, you know, just like film and cinematography, there's a sense of anticipation and repetition that you have between the sound and video elements, that sometimes they kind of go along in parallel paths, sometimes they clearly correlate, you know, they cross over at a certain point, and then kind of disperse again.
Steve, you're working constantly simultaneously in speculative fiction made with sonic fictions with a strong sci-fi slant, it feels like, over the course of your career. How does that dovetail with your work and research for something like your book, Sonic Warfare, or as an academic coming out of philosophy? I mean, even in my book, there's a lot of conspiracy theory, science fiction, sonic fiction lurking around the edges. I mean, I couldn't have written that book. I had no interest in writing that book as a straight history book or a straight theory
book. It's always been intertwined with fiction. And since I stopped being an academic, and so I don't have this kind of policing mechanism making me footnote everything that I write, I think you could call it madness, but maybe I've just completely lost track of the difference between reality and fiction now. And that's the pleasure of not being an academic anymore. And obviously there's a really strong futurism element, especially to the no-tell. But for both of you, and this really applies for your work as well, Lawrence, what does
this no human zone say about your vision of the future? What does this no human zone say about your vision of the future? Both of you. For me, primarily, I like exploring empty places. So it's mostly architectural? No, not in that sense. Just in a sense that, like, I don't know, kind of like Tarkovsky films, when nothing happens, you see the scene. But the moment that you have, it's the same in, like, role-playing games, for example. The moment there's another human figure or some semblance of like personal relationships in a certain scene You stop seeing it as a world and you see it as a social relationship
And that that's true on the internet in games in a real place in a festival so What I was interested in is kind of calling attention to architectural space as a kind of language in itself that is usually hidden because because we're just more drawn to faces and characters and cats and all these things that are alive rather than things that are static. So it's not so much a kind of apocalyptic vision, it's more kind of I'm just more interested in emptiness psychologically. I think two things really. One thing I noticed just being in hotels and airports a lot
Yeah. It seems to me there's like a big zero. A zero is the engine of capitalism. The rich, when you look at the kind of spaces that the rich like to live in, the richer you get, the more empty the space you like to live in is. The less social contact you want, the more isolated. And so I think there's this tendency towards isolation, which is right at the center of capitalism. And I think part of the same, another dimension of that is that obviously what capitalism is producing is, or what it's starting to produce is artificial intelligence. And so the lack of people in this project is to do with existential risk of artificial superintelligence.
So this thing that we're encouraging with full automation, whether it be left accelerationism or right accelerationism, full automation for the people or full automation for the rich, what's lurking behind that is the existential threat posed to humanity of artificial superintelligence that can produce machines that humans can, in other words, intelligence explosion. Yeah. Some people call it singularity. So it's just kind of putting the singularity in the context of these kind of left and right-wing interpretations of full automation. And obviously, artificial superintelligence doesn't necessarily lead to the extinction
of humanity, but it's one of the issues that these developments is throwing up. This is an interesting idea because one of the reasons why artificial intelligence could actually lead to the extension of humanity is because their intelligence will be linked. I.e. they'll all have the artificial intelligence will be one common goal amongst all of the sentient AIs potentially. And that would be an advantage over the mass of individual desires and hopes and dreams of humanity. So going back to the notel, I feel as though the notel is a hotel, but no people are staying
in the hotel. The only thing that's in the hotel are drones. And holograms. Drones and holograms. and holograms, yes. Which brings me to my next point. I say it's a no human zone, but there are actually poignant memento moris of both Space Age and DJ Rashad, who are not only artists on Hyperdub, but also good friends of Steve's. And I thought it was interesting that the only real glimpse of humanity you have there is through memories. And you mentioned the idea of future memories. Yeah, I think what's it exactly the idea of like, you know, for example, if you have, let's say monumental or historic architecture, that's a form of
memory in a city, especially in a place like Barcelona or London. But I think the notion is that you could see the notel as a ruin, but because it's being kept under, it's been maintained by drones, it's a ruin that appears new. It's kind of like the old trope of the spaceship floating through space for thousands of years and still being pristine on the interior. This is still that notion of it becomes timeless because the space is maintained. It's not left to decay to the environment, to the rain and weather. So this quite romantic idea of the ruin as something that's decayed and is biological in terms of how the physical aspect changes like a body and decays like a corpse.
hotel place with both the newness of modernity and like new architecture and new luxury new flats and also the idea of like a ruin that is somehow maintained so is it's another form of life but quite different I think to what is expected one of the one of the first ideas I had after we started talking was the some part of the building would function as a kind of a zone of digital or pseudo digital immortality so one way of keeping Rashad and SpaceApe alive basically obviously the quest for actual immortality uploading people's
consciousness and saving people's digital personalities online is a whole one other thing but obviously one thing musicians do when they die is the there's a certain kind of immortality because they leave you their music so and the developments in the holograms are kind of taking this a step further like biggie two-pack called this hip-hop stars being revivified and so on. So I thought it'd be kind of cool somewhere in the building to have some kind of digital immortality of Space Ape and Rashad as kind of future ghosts inhabiting this otherwise
barren place. And I suppose the thing that's lurking in the background of this project for me is that when I find out that Space Ape and DJ Rashad died, I was in hotels. I was kind of on my own in hotels. So I think there's some scarring there that's persisted that's kind of lurking in the background of the Notel. Absolutely. Although, you talk about this kind of upkeep and digital immortality, but if you look at the landscape of the Notel as it appears in the performance, around the Notel, it's barren.
It's a wasteland. So it actually looks as though there is some sort of death of nature. Whereas if you've taken humans completely out of the equation, but then still all of the world around it is barren, which implies a post-apocalyptic event of some kind. Was that a factor at all in your thinking? In the terrain, you mean? In the terrain, yeah. Yeah, definitely. A lot of my other ones, a lot of my other video simulation works set in the jungle basically and I guess that's on a personal level because my family's from Malaysia so I like taking all these alien environments and just putting them in a familiar landscape. In this one it was really about emptying it
out into this desert mirage scene where I mean where it's just empty and it just kind of it also frames the building just by itself you know there's kind of no noise around it. But also, you know, the desert landscape, that's where they put, you know, Boeing aircraft so they don't decay. You know, it's just that perfectly dry, no humidity, so that's where actual machines go to live for longer, in a very real sense. But actually, just touching on this idea of, like, death and digital immortality, like, you know, Now, the Facebook profiles of dead people. There's, I think, nearly a million dead people on Facebook still, and I have a few friends there.
And the robot population, which in Nick Bostrom's book, Super Intelligence, he lists as 10 million. I would have thought it's much higher than that. So if you just chart these graphs of human population, which kind of took off exponentially in the 20th century with medical science and so on. Robot population with automation is also taking off. It will reach a point where, of course, it's kind of equal. And then vegetation population, that will probably change quite profoundly as well. And then the amount of, let's say, dead people on Facebook and things, of course, those will actually continue to outstrip the living in this strange way. But with the idea of immortality or some kind of embedded memory
in digital systems or through music or through some sort of cultural media, it becomes much richer than it ever was before. Because I think prior to the 20th century, like high culture was what is preserved because it was what's written, it's what's recorded. But with projects like, well just digital projects, the idea of immortality is much more economically feasible, basically. You could have so many more people on a thumb drive or on a laptop. I think that's quite different. Well, then it also means that it becomes accidental as well. It's not even something that you might necessarily choose for yourself, but it would just happen anyway, which is kind of strange. But what about the other interpretation for the landscape,
the barrenness of the landscape, is that it's not even on Earth, is that it could be Mars or something like that. I mean, it's kind of ambiguous, isn't it? We don't say why there's no humans. And we don't specify where it's located. Yeah. The interesting, I thought that was interesting, actually, because there is a sense of Orientalism about it, which is, of course, could be, is interpreted as a futurism because of that idea that Asia is an economic superpower, is going to overtake. But so one thinks that it's also because of the idea
of the communist element. You know, one thinks China. But I guess in the future, we could all just be one massive state or it could be some outpost on another planet. it. Sorry, go ahead. I think what's interesting about even just the term orientalism, because if it's coined by Edward Said in a Middle Eastern context, but in what we're saying here with a kind of East Asian context, what's different with that is that I feel historically there's no ideology involved with kind of fantasizing about Japan or China and so on. They're always seen as extreme other countries, whereas with Orientalism as it relates to the Middle East,
it was more in terms of Islam versus Christianity, or terrorists versus peacekeepers, this kind of rhetoric. So Orientalism is always seen as this kind of wide open space to project fantasies on in relation to, let's say, East Asia or science fiction or any of these things. And of course, there's also a lot of bad guys in science fiction who've been Oriental, like Ming the Merciless, I think, in Flash Gordon, this kind of classic case. So it's quite an interesting cultural issue and one that hasn't been explored that much, I feel. For me, it's interesting to couch it in terms of the future, especially, though.
Well, talking about the music, because one of the reasons why I think it's a very successful performance, it's a very successful performance as a whole, but one of the reasons it's successful is because the music completely stands on its own. So if you saw it even without the visuals, you would still get something out of it. Now this is probably me just putting my own thoughts onto it, but I, especially with the first-person perspective of the drone, you get this a sense of like a sort of like frantic search and a getaway soundtrack and there's i.e. like it's searching and it's curious, it's nervous. Do you think that the drone is looking for something?
Or I'm ascribing desires to machine now. I mean I think judging from what the drone gets up to, that he's looking to liberate its fellow drones. You know, he's hunting around. He finds a table downstairs, where they're all laid out, being prepared. And then at the end, you see this swarm of drones fly away. Now, we don't know this for sure, but that's what it looks like. It looks like the drone is hunting in order to liberate its fellow drones.
Well, I like this. And then you close on quotes from Marx and Delaney. But they go too fast. You can't really read it. You can only pick out certain words. You close from quotes. From Marx and Delaney. Samuel Butler. Oh, okay, right. So the scrolling text towards the end is from Marx's Grundrisse, and specifically the stuff on machines, and from Samuel Butler's Error One, which are both to do with constant capital, kind of subsuming variable capital. In other words, machines subsuming humans. or with Butler machines attaining some kind of autonomy from humanity.
So they're the scrolling text that you see coming down at the end. I think part of what was interesting for me particularly was this, is how you suggest narrative without being literal so much because music is by itself incredibly abstract, even if you have knowledge of the concepts behind things or what the artist's general interests are. So with Unreal Estate, for example, I had the ability to actually have a voiceover, to fully control the music and so on. Whereas with this, the question was like, how do you inject some interest into actually what is quite a dead scene? So one of those devices was we discussed quite early on that like instead of following a kind of human view through it
You would actually follow a drone and then ascribe some kind of agency or curiosity to that thing in front of you this kind of Wildlife documentary, you know, we observe what this thing does and throughout the course of the performance that thing actually Increase gains a greater greater sense of self-awareness awareness, it moves through what was a very innocent-looking space, gradually descends into the factory parts of it where it sees creatures like itself being created and therefore in a way being enslaved to some extent. Then it rebels against this notion that it has been created to serve, then it has this
kind of sense of self-consciousness and with that sense of self-consciousness and purpose it goes throughout the rest of the building trying to free the rest of its fellow beings, you know, its fellow creatures. So in a very kind of loose kind of way that's the story, which is a very kind of archetypal generic story, but it's the closest you could get in a world without dialogue, in a world without text where everything has to be suggested through symbols and objects and spaces, which is quite, you know, it's like a silent film basically, which is quite hard to inject like literal ideas about. So when the text comes in at the end, it's kind of like what the machine, what the drone is thinking to itself in a very subtle way, I guess.
And of course, it's going too fast for a human to read it. We have some time to take questions from the audience if anybody's got any questions for the artists. Don't be shy. I believe there's a microphone. Maybe this company is a hotel where all the power is. How you power all this hotel in this empty space. So there's no humans in it, just musicians, but you cannot have the energy to power the space. What comes about? I'm not explaining. Sorry? The energy to make function of the building.
Where does the energy come from? There's a nuclear reactor in the basement. It functions by itself. Probably. It's automated. There is a sun, actually. There's a gentleman here. For Codna. Is this your final vision of your whole acceleration philosophy? Like I read your interview with Fact where you were explaining the vision of your future and the whole acceleration, philosophic, and is this your ultimate vision of it?
No, I mean the only ultimate thing our labrador does is die. until then everything is just constantly being revised and updated even the notel since we started performing it has been evolving each time something gets added or we perform it differently so I would never say that anything that I do is the ultimate definitive version because you can always do things better So this is just the latest version. Obviously it's an audio-visual performance. It's a different medium to a book, for example. So it's doing different
things. It doesn't have to be so didactic. It doesn't have to be so literal when you're doing this kind of performance. And it may even contradict some things I've said in interviews, which is fine because it's a different medium, so you explore it in a different way. Because you're human, so you're allowed to not to contradict yourself sometimes. Versus a machine, which maybe that would not compute. That's not a question, you don't have to answer that. I'd say yes, but I think there's a point lurking there, which is stopping machines from contradicting themselves, which I don't think our drone would be happy with that.
I suppose that depends on the code, how sophisticated the code gets between now and then. I mean, the wildlife documentary aspect of the drone is supposed to be exploring and playing. And so if an artificial intelligence is playing, then, which is an odd thing in itself, then I don't see why it could also be contradicting itself. That's a good point. I mean, because the thing is, not to delve into the completely speculative realm of artificial intelligence, which doesn't exist in this form yet, but just because an artificial intelligence becomes sentient doesn't mean that it's going to have desires in the same way that humans will, or anything like that.
For instance, the idea that they might want to be free. Maybe that's something humans might want or will want, but that might not necessarily be something that machines will want. I think what's really interesting is that one of the most likely routes to superintelligence is the idea of machine learning and just highly sophisticated forms of machine learning. So, to me, what's interesting creatively is that it will have the whole of human culture or digitally recorded human culture, let's say, to learn from. And then it would understand emotion as one form of desire. I mean, because it would have learned from human things.
So it wouldn't have sense organs, wouldn't be born in the same way and so on. but it would have a certain awareness about what desires could be, whether it's good, like love versus jealousy or whatever it is, but it would have some kind of model for that. It would have an abstract model for that, which is just as real as the real thing. I mean, you have many humans without emotions. You have sociopaths and psychopaths and all of these different versions on the spectrum of feeling in humanity. So I'm sure it would be the same for any kind of consciousness. Yeah, there's a really old thought experiment about, a philosophical thought experiment about if you had a person who grew up in a completely monochrome environment,
but that person was trained as a neuroscientist. And so they knew everything about what happened in your head and all of the chemical reactions if you saw the color red. But they never have actually seen the color red. so would they actually know what that experience was? And I wonder if that's sort of a useful corollary. I think we have another question here. Which sci-fi movies inspired you, both in terms of soundtrack and in terms of images and architectures for your work? Well, certainly with maybe a couple of tracks,
Koyaanis Katzi and the Philip Glass soundtrack, like the track Notell is basically me ripping off Philip Glass straight up. But there's a bit of the shining lurking in this as well, a bit of this kind of deserted, haunted hotel. And obviously, most films that have dealt with artificial intelligence have dealt with it through this idea, or robots have dealt with it through the idea directly or indirectly of the Asimov laws. So I, Robot, Blade Runner, Terminate, this idea that when you build a robot, you program into its basic DNA doesn't allow it to hurt its maker. It doesn't allow it to
kill a human or harm a human or harm the person that made it. So it's something that goes kind of back to the Frankenstein myth as well. So these kind of Promethean myths that lurk, that run through a lot of science fiction films, I think they're all kind of lurking in the background here whether it's like a Blade Runner where he's asked Roy Batty's asking he says give me more life fucker he can't override the Asimov laws so he's asking his maker to give him more life the Nottel is a different situation because the makers have gone and so the idea of being a wildlife documentary is to see how these drones would... how they would act, how they would behave
once this kind of programming was lifted, once the Asimov laws have been lifted and they're not being told by humans what to do anymore. Obviously, there's no humans left, so there's no humans for them to kill, which is the main thing that the Asimov laws are about. But I think, you know, there's a lot of... That's a main theme, a generic theme that runs through most science fiction movies that deal with robots, androids, artificial intelligence and so on. So... Yeah. What's interesting about those examples as well, especially like Blade Runner and Terminator 2, is that they all end with the death of the machine. You know, so when the machine like Arnie, like in T-800 or whatever in Terminator 2, kills itself at the end, and the same is what...
For that reason, Ex Machina is probably the one that's most in my mind, because that's the one where the robot kills a human, and then it's free to explore the world. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, exactly. And then, well, in Blade Runner, depending on what version it is, it's, you know, you have Deckard and Rachel driving off, not knowing whether, how long they'll live, in relation to another Roy Batty who's just died, you know, so there's always this kind of like death drive going on. For me, in terms of scenography, I guess, I was most interested in, besides actual Earth architecture, like science fiction films, where the action takes place on a space station, let's say, or some kind of vessel that is, like, where all the action takes place, kind of like Solaris, 2001, where these, everything is contained in that floating world.
Did we have any other questions from the audience? Well, having seen the performance, I urge you to see it tomorrow. You're getting a sense now of some of the ideas that fueled it, and there's so much to think about and enjoy, and I'm sure you'll feel the same way. So thanks very much for coming. Much appreciated. Thank you.