Interview with Maria Oiva, Aku Meriläinen and Milka Luhtaniemi

We interviewed Maria Oiva, Aku Meriläinen and Milka Luhtaniemi, members of the Faster, Easier working group. #digiteatteri: Faster, Easier - a queer play that is critical of technology, demanding of reality and dreamlike - will premiere at Mad House on 15.4.2025.

Photo by Helena Minkkilä

Mad House Helsinki: You've done a series of shows with artificial intelligence. Can you tell us what the combination of AI, queer and live performance means to you in your practice?

Maria Oiva and Aku Meriläinen: The initial motivaltion for the Queer AI project (maybe 2018) was the perception of the normativity of AI. The AI analysing the image identified only two genders, and with very binary external definitions of gender. Throughout the process, we have been looking for a way to preserve ourselves and the space to be who we are in this ever-evolving AI world. 

Smart technologies are controlled by ethical values and have an impact everywhere in people's daily lives, in the functioning of societies and are thus linked to an invisible exercise of power. AI affects how we understand being human and how we relate to other beings. AI is politically, ethically and artistically-aesthetically problematic. At the same time, it has many potentials and, above all, it is here. New technologies have always created a crisis for the making of art. AI is undoubtedly unique as a technology, but that does not take away the fact that artistic work with new technologies is a new form of resistance, a gesture of appropriation. It is active agency, rather than watching from the periphery. I believe that we are looking for forms of digital diversity. The agency of AI forces us to look at performance, theatrical entities and agency from new perspectives.

In relation to performance and AI, the body is at the centre. The duality of AI, yes or no, living/lifeless, black/white is at conflict with the core of queer. In a way, it is in conflict with life itself. The greatest contradiction is probably immortality and mortality. Mortality is so deeply 'flawed': what kind of friction is created between fragile, random and illogical bodies and the median and absolute world proposal of artificial intelligence? 

Mad House: You wrote a Faster, Easier playtext with an AI. What was it like to write with the AI in dialogue and how much control did you give it? How did it guide you? How did the AI evolve in the dialogue between you and it?

Photo by Venla Helenius

Milka Luhtaniemi: Writing with AI was quite challenging at the beginning, because at the time of writing (2023-24) there was no language material of particular interest used as training material for AI. I think this is good in itself, because I am critical of the use of artistic knowledge in the development of language models (e.g. the author Carmen Maria Machado has spoken about this in a critical tone in public). My own linguistic sense was strongly against the language produced by AI, and I felt I was writing with a kind of pastiche-language tool. For a long time, I was somewhat desperate in my work.

However, it was important to be committed to the method, as the aim of the project was to explore the potential of AI in artistic work. As such, I myself felt it was quite central to do this work of trial and error myself, as a poet and writer, without leaving the solutions to the technology experts.

During the writing process, I realised that, despite the experimentation, I could not train the AI to remember previous scenes and develop a performance text based on that memory. That was my first problem. The second key problem was that the AI did not even understand the subtext, i.e. the tension that rippled through the unspoken tension of the play. It was precisely that subtext and that hidden, breathtaking tension that I wanted to work with, because my aim was to make the performance text move in a certain way, to make it fly. I decided, through various experiments, to develop a dramaturgical structure that would allow me to control the starting point of the performance, its subtext and its tension. So the AI would be a bit like a presence humming in the room, but I myself would build the room and paint the walls.

In the end, I developed the premise of the play so that the artificiality and sense of unreality are part of the dramaturgy of the text. The premise is this: Two characters meet and they don't remember where they know each other from. There is some kind of connection between them, a deeply intimate experience of recognition. So it's a love story, about meeting for the first time. The play develops a kind of spiral of remembering and forgetting, a constant variation. In a way, the characters are rehearsing how they meet and how they are together. I think this is a deeply human experience, and it's also how memory and cognition work. In love relationships, too, the constant repetition and, on the other hand, forgetting, do the silent work, for better or worse.

I let the AI write different versions of the same scenes, and when the AI wrote grammatically incorrect scenes that felt like copies of the previous ones, it only served to advance the story. The audience and the characters themselves are left to judge for themselves what feels real and where there is some kind of unreal distortion, error or glitch. I think there is an inherent awkwardness and opacity in human relationships and interactions, so the oddities created by the AI felt oddly necessary to deepen the narrative.

On the other hand, the materiality of language also comes into play at times: at one stage, I let the AI rewrite a scene written in spoken language without giving any special instructions. The AI wrote the scene in a very similar way to my own scene, but added what felt like strange parenthesis and translated the language into general language throughout. On stage, switching between spoken and written language often means a huge change in the way a scene is perform. So with such small changes I achieved big turns, and some much-needed small inconsistencies were resolved in the poetics of the text.

The work was terribly challenging, but in the end I loved writing this text and it flicked in my mind for a very long time. I think that AI should be used very carefully, also because of its environmental impact and political problems, but on the other hand, it seems essential that the performers have something to say about this phenomenon and this mode of production that is here to stay.

Read more about #digiteatteri:  Nopeemmin, helpommin (Faster, easier)