A Perfect Sky

Not only is there talk of “artificial intelligence” everywhere, AI is already intervening in everyday life in almost all areas of life, taking over administration, organising our love life, determining the soundtrack of the train journey, reducing errors in the operating theatre and planning holidays. She writes poems and letters of application, art criticism and theatre plays. Behind it all is the dream of perfection, the longing to fill in the gaps, to make the world a better place, to free it from what, as “human error”, is the cause of misunderstandings, annoyance, effort and pain. Alongside this triumph of speed, accuracy and precision, the human body seems strangely fragile and weak, imperfect in its transience, its ageing, its fatigue. But isn’t this precisely what makes people uncopyable: the hesitation, the unpredictability of feeling and the power to think change?

In their new collaboration, Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk explore this contrast. The triumph of the machines comes at a time when it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to be together, to overcome loneliness. Richter and van Dijk’s new piece tells of fragility and fragmentation, of robot romance and analogue longing, of love in the age of its technical reproducibility.