Theatre review: Imperfect National Memory Project captures the voice of an artist in two minds about AI

National Memory Project

Teater Ekamatra
Drama Centre Black Box
June 25, 8pm 

This circuitous two-hander set in not-so-distant Singapore is playwright Johnny Jon Jon’s futile tussle with the relentless march of artificial intelligence (AI), its indisputable efficacy making counter-arguments appear trivial and moot.

The audience can almost see him arguing around himself, rehashing familiar thrust and parries ad infinitum. It is dense with ideas, incorporating also a slightly out-of-place mention of the authorities’ plans to train a South-east Asia-sensitive large language model using authors’ works.

Confused wrangling is par for the course for this disruptive technology. The unsatisfactory conclusion only proves the uphill battle creatives face, persuading both others and their own hearts that public policy should not merely be a numbers game.

The abstract, Escher-inspired stairs forming the set is the work of director Mohd Fared Jainal. It serves as the home base of the national AI office, prison cell and maze of civil servant Judy’s (Ellison Tan) memories.

Its metaphorical gesture at the illusion of progress is clear, but also makes for a kind of theatre green screen on which bulbs are scattered. The coloured lights are at different points turned up high to overwhelm the entire stage in white, yellow and blue. It is a nifty device in scene-shifting that leans into the play’s futuristic, sci-fi occupations.

Right from the start, Judy is seen communicating with an AI version of her dead mother, who is capable of asking why her daughter is working late nights and making virtual coffee – an eerie presence, backed by the sounds of bubbling water and kitchenware being moved.

Judy works for a national agency that is training an AI to make sure “all systems are simply go”, able to pre-empt trouble and unfailingly raise red flags, such as those missed in the real-life tragic death of four-year-old Megan Khung in 2020.

In a democratic impulse put upon Judy by her superiors, her task is to coax a memory – any memory – out of death-row inmate, the uncooperative Ahmad (Fir Rahman). The latter understands, but refuses to speak the bureaucratic language of English. He converses only in Malay – a language gag that allows for some jokes.

Fir doubles as Judy’s determined superior, a role he plays with a strange, maladroit soft-spokenness, not wholly intentionally. But he makes thorough points about how contributing memories to the AI is an effort at creating a system more attuned to locals’ needs, at a time when Western and Chinese models predominate – a sort of office mantra.

There are as well reflections on the pointlessness of memories shorn of their original contexts or shoehorned to fit national directives; and the unceasing development of forward-looking Singapore, which is as merciless now in embracing the new as when it first moved pig farm dwellers into Housing Board flats.

The most thought-provoking is Jon Jon’s pitch that maybe the process of losing memories is an organic process of attrition – just like the falling out of teeth – and renewal.

This right to forget, crucial to sanity, has been obliterated by technology’s rapacious ability to catalogue and absorb. The AI that is Judy’s mother glitches with too much input, unable to discern strands of memory and the language she speaks. She finally resorts to motherhood cliches – undiscriminating collection does not so much nuance the picture as render it meaningless.

But where then does that leave national memory? Jon Jon’s answer is that this is always personal, though this reviewer thinks there may still be value in a collective narrative rooted in nuance, care and generational respect.

The play’s secret genius may be in having the characters sketch out drawings on the stage’s white surfaces as they talk, mostly unreferenced in the dialogue. This exercise of carving the lines to recall memory and process grief escapes the reach of AI, able to reproduce images but not replicate the emotions in their creation: from using drawing to avoid eye contact to the smearing of it in choosing to move on.

Art is an intangible memory resource too, and sometimes, it is okay that it is lost. National Memory Project is one such imperfect work, full of contradictions for a confusing age.

Book It/National Memory Project

Where: Drama Centre Black Box, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street
When: June 26 and 27, 8pm; June 28 and 29, 3 and 8pm
Admission: $45, excluding booking fee
Info:

str.sg/iDVL