Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I was having a lovely time at the Portland Opera last weekend. The show was Verdi’s Fallstaff, a widely-acknowledged comedic classic adapted from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The leading man wonderfully embodied the rakish cavalier; the supporting cast sang beautifully and acted hilariously, and the orchestra was finely conducted from beginning to end. The setting was somewhat modernized, envisioning the action as taking place in a country club with swimming pools, golf courses, and all the luxuries appropriate to the class of lady a scoundrel might seduce to maintain a lavish lifestyle. Throughout the stage were large panels, on which were projected landscapes and stately houses, serving double duty as animated backdrops and spaces for actors to hide behind during madcap action scenes. It was all very smart, passionate, and entertaining in the extreme.

I was having a lovely time indeed, and at intermission between acts two and three, I began leafing through the program, entertaining myself with the insights of the creative team. Then the fly landed in my ointment, and if you’ve ever had a fly in your ointment you know just how off-putting that can be. It left me grumbling through the whole intermission, and not even the resumption of the music could fully take my mind off of its buzzing.

“Digital Art Meets Tradition in the 21st Century,” ran the title of one short article in the program. The projection designer (it would be trivially easy to find out who this is, but since this isn’t really about them, despite my grouchiness, I won’t be saying their name) had laid down a few paragraphs about the intersection of opera and new technology, how the demands of the stage were different from those of cinema, and how technology allowed new media to “trespass” on the old: “I walk the line between conqueror and custodian, heathen and acolyte, and am governed above all by an uncompromising passion for the ephemerality of live performance,” he wrote. “Yes, those projections were nicely done,” I said to myself.

Enter the fly:

“At the time of writing, our design team’s imagination continues to wander freely, using the latest tools of generative AI cautiously as we explore how the digital image can build upon the music, honoring rather than upstaging it.”

“Of all places,” I thought, “I can’t even get away from this shit at the opera.”

Weaseled into the fourth and last paragraph was a quiet admission that some portion of the visuals projected on those great white rectangles was not the work of an artist, but of a computer algorithm designed to approximate what an artist might have made, if they’d been briefed on the director’s intentions and paid for their time. How much of it, what percentage exactly? No way to know! You’ll just have to take the projection designer’s word for it that generative AI was employed “cautiously.” As far as I know (and I’d be delighted to be corrected), “cautiously” could means that the algorithm did all of it, and then somebody with a human brain gave it a quick once-over to make sure it hadn’t made one of its notorious and hilarious goofs like inserting the Eiffel Tower behind the club house, or a team of five little groundskeepers to tend the lawn with thirteen arms between them, or a hentai tentacle monster to leer at old Falstaff in the sauna. What a scamp, that gen-AI algorithm!

Yes, the trespassing heathen wants us to understand that generative AI was used “cautiously,” but in that punk rock, avant-garde, boundary pushing sort of way that means they still call you an innovator. Look at that word, “cautiously;” sitting there like they know exactly why audience members might object to letting a computer do a creative’s job, and they don’t want you to think they’d do anything so outrageous as “upstage” the music. Besides, they insist, what happens on the stage is “ephemeral,” and the content of the projections is “defined in its own destruction,” so it’s not like it actually matters if we take a little credit for something we didn’t do.

Eventually the curtain came up again, and the final act proceeded. All of the most lovely aspects of the show were still lovely. I was pleased that they used a fog machine for the final scene in the forest, rather than just typing “eerie forest floor with fairies at midnight” into an input bar and projecting the output onto the back wall. Though I’m sure it would have been done cautiously, of course, it having first been determined to every one’s satisfaction that the fog didn’t contain any lewd messages.

The projections were very well done. The content of the projections (and I will be calling it “content,” rather than “artwork” until somebody proves to me otherwise) was unobtrusive and blandly pleasant. I hardly even thought of them before Act 3 began; between listening to the music, watching the singers move about the stage, and casting my eyes briefly upward for translations from the Italian, I was very well occupied in contemplating the work of the human beings who translated their passion into performance. It was vexing to have to devote additional mental power to figuring out what the creative passion of the algorithm added to the mix.

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Did I mention that generative AI is a rapidly accelerating environmental disaster and that the best plan we currently have for mitigating that is hoping that renewable energy sources scale up really fast? I almost didn’t mention it, because most people stop listening when you bring “the environment” into the conversation, and what does climate change matter anyway when the AI will show me in just a few seconds what my bird would look like if he were the Pope? Surely there can’t be anything wrong with pushing the magic art-making button over and over again!