For many years the scientists, philosophers, artists, and my grandma’s of the world have often wondered whether a robot can truly create art. Today I’ll be the judge of that as I review 1100101011100 or When Spambot met Autopilot-System-7, the brand new show written, produced, directed, and acted, by robots.
The show opens up on a young spambot, Spambot220339328 to be precise. Spambot220339328 is doing his normal spambotty thing, posting comments on Youtube about how to get free Amazon gift-cards. Unfortunately, Spambot220339328 feels unfulfilled, he feels like nobody really cares about him, and that nobody is properly utilizing his fake Amazon gift-cards. Unsure how to continue his life, Spambot220339328 decides to travel to Florida, in the hopes he can trick some old people into getting his Amazon gift-cards.
On his way there he meets Autopilot-System-7. At first they don’t get along because Spambot220339328 tries to get her to check out an Amazon gift-card, but eventually they fall in love.
I don’t want to ruin the plot for you. But I will anyway. They all die. I didn’t feel like it was very organic (pardon the pun). Near the end of the play, I accidentally spilled my water on a nearby power conduit. As I looked down to clean off my pants suddenly the entire stage fell silent, and I heard screams of pain. When I looked up everyone was dead! I just decided to leave then, I wasn’t going to have one of those poorly executed endings.
Up until the sudden death at the end, the entire plot felt very cookie cutter, possibly because an electronic cookie cutter wrote it. Everything was leading up to a classic reconciliation that I could have predicted with my eyes closed and my ears covered in thick liquid gold, and then all of a sudden BOOM! dead robots!
Both of the actors didn’t seem very organic, I hate to say it in fear of being deemed anti-algorithm, but the actors seemed very… robotic.
In conclusion, I really struggle to call this “art”. I like to think of it more so as crude scratches on a cave wall, but did I mention the scratches are done with lasers? But what’s this? They’re in a cave so there’s no sun, i.e. no light for the solar panels. So in the end it just turns out it’s a dead robot and you’ve got homicide detectives on your hands.
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