Philip Speakman

live role play performance
1 hour
7 - 9pm, 21st February 2025

A cold February night in 1998. Four friends on holiday in the English countryside are driving back to their accommodation after witnessing a catastrophe at an English village where a ritual tradition, successfully performed yearly since the Civil War, this year ended in disaster. Haunted by what they have seen, the friends set off into the night, navigating dark country roads. But as dense, monotonous forests scroll past their windows, a road to elsewhere starts to emerge.

The Road That Eats Thoughts invites the audience to watch as the surreal narrative of thes four “players”’ unfolds. The work explores our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence and the myths and magical thinking endemic to popular understandings of these complex technologies. Blending live projections, audio design, and interactive storytelling, the work delves into the societal and epistemological consequences of algorithmic feedback loops, information silos, and the unsettling phenomenon of AI “hallucinations”; where machines generate inaccurate yet convincingly real outputs. Through the metaphor of driving along a dark forest road, cocooned in the car’s interior and prey to whatever emerges within the outstretched beams of the headlights, the work attempts to articulate an experience of networked life where there is infact something lurking in the darkness on the other side of of the glass noting our decisions, choosing what images and information we see and discover about the world around us.

By reproducing both our interactions with, and the processes behind, AI systems within the structure of the story and its participatory elements, the work interrogates how these technologies shape human decision-making, prompting audiences to confront themes of agency, and the increased prevalence of seemingly human interactions actually being driven by AI, as well as the flip side of this; how our interactions become more machine like as our behaviours are predicted and enmeshed within the production of data sets, simulations and digital doppelgängers.

Commissioned by Chemist Gallery, and curated by Rebecca Edwards and Chemist Gallery, as part 'Conversations with AI'.

With thanks to the participants Rachel Irons, Billy Sassi, Danny Pagarani and Joe Moss, voice over acting by Jack Solloway, and Kineret Lourie, Ariel Caine and Rebecca Edwards for the opportunity and support.