If you can dream it, it’s probably been performed at the Fringe at least once before. There is nothing too bizarre, too loud, too poorly reviewed to feature in the Fringe’s annual programme, scrutinised by those in the know with awe commonly reserved for a religious text. Yet this year, in the latest spate of cancelled culture, there is no such luck.
Fear not, for Melissa Terras and Gavin Inglis have stepped up to the plate, creating an artificial intelligence bot which will tweet out shows every hour on the hour. The catch seems hardly worth mentioning – the shows do not exist.
Trawling through some eight years of material, and arguably more original than some of the festival’s comics, the bot is tasked with “regurgitating almost-plausible summaries at hourly intervals on Twitter.” The software has been designed to mimic the brain’s neural network, and is affiliated with the University of Edinburgh, making it perhaps among the more informed twitter contributors.
The bot is not alone in its creation of faux shows. Poet and theatre critic Natasha Tripney has spent time cutting and pasting a selection of the very best show bios together to create entries which verge on the avant-garde.
For Mark Fisher, the robot asks that we decide: “Could these cryptic words be a clue to the surprise hit of the season? Or is the muddled synopsis a forewarning of a muddled production?”
The ImprovBot is available to offer blurbs for shows until the end of August. Perhaps some will even be performed next year.
