Blog

Voice Scroll, BMO Lab’s AI-based voice to real-time panoramic image system, was featured at Neurips 2023 in New Orleans in December 2023 as part of the inaugural ‘Creative Stream’ at this premiere academic artificial intelligence and machine learning conference,

Voice Scroll was presented as a performance with BMO Lab’s AI as Foil artist-in residence poet Nick Flynn during the conference opening event.

Voice Scroll was also presented as a live interactive demonstration in the Neurips Creative Stream exhibition hall. BMO Lab director David Rokeby said that one of the great pleasures of presenting at Neurips was the surprise and pleasure that conference attendees expressed on hearing that BMO Lab is an AI research lab within a theatre and performance program.

Algorithmic Millennium: Creating Staged & Digital Games – Feb 4, 2025

What does experimental performance have to do with video games? How do emerging media provide new landscapes for diasporic narratives? How can live and digital bodies perform and resist algorithmic control? The BMO Lab’s winter keynote will explore these questions and more with two of Canada’s most exciting young artists: Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Remy Siu, of the multimedia performance collective Hong Kong Exile and the video game company Sunset Visitor. Their conversation with Dr. Doug Eacho aims to explore transpacific politics, vocal performance, motion capture, the state of electronic dance music, uses of allegory, anime fashion… at least.  

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Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theatre, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Oct. 3 2024

In this talk, Dr Chun introduced her forthcoming book, Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theatre, Technology, and Politics in Modern China, which draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in 20th century China. This unique approach to Chinese theatre history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theatre details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theatre amid the political upheavals of China’s revolutionary century. 

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Beware of Robots: Performance, Questions of Technology, and a Strong Program for Theatre Studies with Professor Ulf Otto – Mar. 27, 2024

This talk shows how prevailing ways of making scholarly sense of performance are challenged by the consideration of technology. It tracks down the changing meaning of technology in the course of a cultural historiography of theater; and turning to the transdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, proposes a relational materialist concept of technology. 

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Staging Infrastructure: Universal Child Care with Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken, Mar. 8, 2024

Norah Sadava and Amy Nostbakken discuss their production Universal Child Care, and the process of developing the work.

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From Digital to Dressing Room: Hair Theory, Technology, and the Styling of Black Women on Broadway – Christin Essen – Mar. 1, 2024

Essin’s research draws sharp focus to the skilled Broadway professionals whose use of analog and digital technologies prepare the bodies of actors to perform. Even costume technologies as small as a hairpin, she argues, have the potential to unlock the situational and cultural complexities of backstage labour. 

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Symposium: Interpolations 1 – Oct. 21, 2023

a one-day symposium at the BMO Lab devoted to the interfaces between computational media and the performing arts. A dozen scholars of digital performance, VR theatre, the tech industry, computational dance, and more gathered to chart connections and pathways for this increasingly vital area of research.

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Session 1: Virtual Sensoria, w/ Elizabeth Hunter, Elise Morrison, Jessica Rajko

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Session 2: AI as Theatre, w/ Miriam Felton-Dansky, Christopher Grobe, and Lindsay Brandon Hunter

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Session 3: Still Exhausted: TDR Launch Panel, w/ Catie Cuan, Douglas Eacho, and Sydney Skybetter

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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Commodification
Keynote address: Annie Dorsen and Sam Gill 
Responses: Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Sarah Bay-Cheng

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Artists’ talk with the creators of asses.masses – Sept. 20, 2023

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AI Salon – Text to Image Generation – April 14, 2023

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AI Salon – Text Generation and Large Language Models – March 31, 2023

We explore the recent developments in Large Language Models such as ChatGPT., talking about how they work, giving detailed examples of the generation process, testing out many prompts on various models, and discussing the many implications of these systems.

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Black Movement in Digital Spaces – LaJuné McMillian – March 2, 2023

Lajuné McMillian discusses the exploitation, erasure, and dilution of Black movement and Black culture historically through appropriation, the evolution of Black face, and the commodification of our existence. “

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Relational Dramaturgies – Imanuel Schipper – October 25, 2022

A lecture by Imanuel Schipper, dramaturg for Rimini Protokoll.

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AI As Foil Series: Hacking the Voice – Friday, Mar 18, 2022

A discussion with Toronto vocalist Fides Krucker, and London beatboxer Reeps One (Harry Yeff)

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AI as Foil Series: A New Musical Frontier: AI Meets Music – Oct 8, 2021

A discussion with music producer Annelise Noronha and AI scientist Sageev Oore

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Canadian Stage Festival of Ideas and Creation 2021

Presentations of the activities of the performers-in-residence Sebastien Heins, Ryan Cunningham, Maev Beaty and Rick Miller at the BMO Lab.

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AI Generated Text: GPT-2 and Performance – May 18, 2021

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Voxels: Invisible motion sensing triggers in performance – May 19, 2021

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Live Motion Capture and Performance – May 20, 2021

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AI as Foil Series: The Essence of Style: AI Meets Fashion Design – Feb 19, 2021

A Discussion with fashion designer Daniela Bosco and Idris Mootee, CEO of Urbancoolab

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Diagonal: “Enchanting Infrastructure: New Approaches to AI” – Feb. 5, 2021

How should the recent explosion of research, investment, and discourse around “artificial intelligence” be critically understood? 

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Hacking Choreography: Kate Sicchio – Dec 2, 2020

Dr. Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology.

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AI as Foil Series: The Automation of Beauty: AI’s Role in Architecture – Nov 27, 2020

A discussion with architect Thomas Payne and Francesco Iorio, CEO of Augmenta AI

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AI as Foil Series: Moves Like Moon Watcher – Oct 9, 2020

A discussion with Dan Richter

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ARTificial Intelligence: AI and Creativity Distinguished Lecture – Allison Parrish – Aug 28, 2020

A lecture by distinguished computational poet Allison Parrish.

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Kyle McDonald – Artist Talk, March 2, 2020

An artist’s talk by groundbreaking AI artist Kyle McDonald.

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Friedrich Kirschner, ’Spiel und Objekt’, Sept 19, 2019

A presentation by Friedrich Kirschner of the Ernst Busch School of the Performing Arts, Berlin.

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Link: A feature article and video on the event

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Renowned poet Nick Flynn, in collaboration with David Rokeby, media artist and director of the BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Toronto, presented a groundbreaking interactive performance at the Moody Center, Rice University, on April 12, 2024. Titled “THEY ARE FALLING ALL AROUND ME / Postcards from the Edge of Latent Space,” the event explored the intersection of image, poetry, and artificial intelligence (AI). 

Flynn and Rokeby were joined by Rice professor and composer Anthony Brandt for a conversation on the ethical implications and artistic possibilities after the performance. 

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For the past year, Flynn, alongside David Rokeby and Natalie Klym, curator of the Lab’s AI as Foil residency program, has been pioneering an innovative blend of artistic expression and cutting-edge technology. The collaborative performance features a unique real-time voice-to-scrolling image generator, developed by Rokeby, fine-tuned on a dataset derived from Flynn’s latest book, Low.

The AI system responds dynamically to live voice provocations delivered by Flynn during the performance, creating an ever-changing scroll of images. Flynn’s poems, collages, and prompts serve as the foundation, guiding the AI to generate visually stunning and surreal images. 

The performance premiered in New Orleans in December 2023 at NeurIPs, the largest gathering of AI scientists in the world.

Nick Flynn reflects on the project, stating, “In this moment where AI is making its way into our collective subconscious, this project suggests one possible future—a conversation between human creativity and artificial intelligence.”

April 4, 2024 by Tara Maher and David Rokeby 

BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI Director David Rokeby joined multimedia performance and installation artist Laurie Anderson to present one of the lab’s research projects as part of her sold-out show on Friday, April 5, 2024, at Koerner Hall in the Royal Conservatory of Music. Anderson has been engaged with innovative technologies throughout her career and became fascinated by BMO Lab’s Voice Scroll during informal Zoom sessions hosted by BMO Lab’s AI as Foil residency program with mutual friend and current lab artist-in-residence American poet Nick Flynn.  

The Voice Scroll project is an AI system that transforms spoken voice into a continually evolving visual panorama in real time. It is a product of BMO Lab’s continuing exploration of AI in the context of live performance. 

“Conventionally one might think of Voice Scroll as a system that illustrates the words that you speak,” says Rokeby. “But really, I think it’s more helpful and honest to think of it in these terms: Through its training, the AI model has constructed a world… something called the ‘latent space’… a world of possibilities linking words and images, and we can use our spoken words as a means of navigating this remarkable, and remarkably strange, landscape.” 

According to Rokeby, Anderson has been thinking about and working in AI-related spheres for many years, which makes her a great collaborator. “She comes from a position of decades of knowledge and experience in this space, but also with a really generous curiosity,” says Rokeby. “It’s been wonderful to wander through the crazy set of possibilities and strangenesses of what these AI systems can do with her.”  

After a recent exploratory zoom session, Anderson surprised Rokeby by suggesting she feature Voice Scroll in her upcoming Koerner Hall concert. And so, it transpired that half-way through her concert, Anderson invited Rokeby on stage, and together, they spent ten minutes exploring Voice Scroll together, discussing its possibilities and implications, and offering some audience members the chance to interact with the system. According to Rokeby, it was a wonderful experience, and a wonderful opportunity to share the work the Lab does with a broader public. Given that we are all affected by AI technology, sharing insights into these technologies beyond the bounds of academia is an important part of BMO Lab’s mandate. 

Anderson will be working with the Lab as part of the AI as Foil artist-in-residence program in the near future. Rokeby is very excited about this prospect as he believes that working with Anderson, with her creativity, her depth of experience and her curiosity, will lead to some very interesting new directions and possibilities for the lab’s research.