Created by the London based duo dmstfctn (Francesco Tacchini, Oliver Smith) Waluigi’s Purgatory is an interactive performance featuring a live soundtrack by Evita Manji. Set in a 3D theatre simulated in real-time, the performance tells the story of an AI simply called ‘W.’ finding itself in a purgatory for AIs that cheated during their training.
Burdened by memories of its past and by doubts on its future, W. explores purgatory with the help of interacting audiences, learning the uncanny stories of other characters. Experienced as a dream, Waluigi’s Purgatory is a journey through the contradictions of machine intelligence as an AI learns to accept that its desires may not align with those of its human trainers.
dmstfctn
Audience guides W. through its encounters and make choices on its behalf by using their phone to each move an individual stage light within the 3D theatre. Characters are animated in real time through facial motion capture and voice modulation, and an ambient instrumental soundtrack is performed by Evita Manji, responding to storyline and audience interaction alike.
The title of the work hints at the ‘Waluigi Effect’, a meme theory which emerged in 2023 proposing that AIs display a tendency to go rogue or act adversarially due to the large amount of protagonist-antagonist narrative tropes found in internet texts used to train them.
Waluigi’s Purgatory was supported by Serpentine’s Arts Technologies programme and, in themes and format, loosely follows on from GOD MODE (ep. 1), the artists’ previous interactive performance about AI training and cheating.
