The Lusty Horn series
INPUT
Many of Shakespeare's plays contain songs. In the comedy As You Like It (1599), the players suddenly burst into a merry number: "What shall he have that killed the deer?" It is generally considered just a frivolous interlude. But when I asked GENAI to respond to the lyric, the results were brilliantly bonkers: a lineup of old folk with rounded shoulders and bad teeth. Gorgeously costumed and masked. Perfectly cast to bring to life the theatricality of the original in contemporary Shoreditch style.
OUTPUT
I hadn't expected the pathos. GENAI found that. Somewhere in GENAI's billions of artificial neurones, a connection had occurred. A synthetic, synpatic spark of recognition between some sentiment in the words and an aspect of fragile humaness. GENAI appears to have detected something in Shakespeare's lyric that scholars perhaps have missed; it's interpretation described as 'a dark jungle of perplexities.'
Video
Shakespeare walking to work
Shakespeare spent a lot of time and effort on words. Elizabethan theatre design was basic. Audiences needed to imagine themselves in battles, enchanted forests, palaces, foreign cities, and scandalous bedrooms from mediaeval Scotland to ancient Rome. The words were written to excite human minds that would never see those events, times, or places. They could ignite the imagination in ways that we have lost.
AI can do the same. It can picture, apparently, anything. I wondered what would happen if I put these organic and computational creatives together and tagged along myself. What could we produce together?
The Lusty Horn
As You Like It, Act IV, Scene 2
Enter JAQUES and LORDS, in the habit of foresters
- Jaques: Which is he that killed the deer?
- Lord: Sir, it was I.
- Jaques:
Let's present him to the Duke, like a Roman conqueror; and it would do well to set the deer's horns upon his head for a
branch of victory. Have you no song, forester, for this purpose? - Lord: Yes, sir.
- Jacques:
Sing it; 'tis no matter how it be in tune, so it make noise enough.
Orpheus with his Lute
Orpheus was a talented plucker. With his singing and playing he charmed the ferryman Charon and the dog Cerberus, guardians of the River Styx. His music and grief so moved Hades, king of the underworld, that Orpheus was allowed to take Eurydice with him back to the world of life and light – in the style of Billie Eilish.
Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
I'm introducing AI to Shakespeare. Here I'm taking Ariel's song from the Tempest, where he's telling Fernando that his father has drowned, and being quite mean about it. AI felt it begged a Death Metal interpretation. I can't believe nobody's ever thought of that.
Fear No More
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Archive
Trees
I asked AI to think about it's brain; how it thinks, and mainly about how it remembers so much. What does it feel like to know all that stuff?
Machines
I asked AI to tell me more about itself: Where were you born? Do you have family? The usual getting-to-know-you stuff.
Dreams
Why can't we remember our dreams? Why are they wiped from the board at the end of the lesson of sleep, leaving only a dusty shadow?
Insults
Shakespeare's insults provide rich prompt-fodder. I asked AI to bring his words to life. Things got very weird, very quickly.
Shoreditch
Prompts drawn from Shakespeare's plays brought to life in contemporary London.
