An AI fish is the lead in Harold Hejazi's new stage game
Legend of Harri Kala opens October 9 in Espoo, Finland, where a Baltic grayling listens, answers and turns whatever the room says into that night's myth.
“Would you like to become fish?” That is the offer on the table in the reel Harold Hejazi posted over the weekend, and starting Friday, October 9, a whole audience at Espoo Theatre in Finland gets to answer. Legend of Harri Kala is a game built for a stage instead of a storefront: five performances through October 22, no download, no single player. The lead is an NPC, a Baltic grayling who listens to the room and talks back in real time.
Development footage from Legend of Harri Kala, Unity editor windows and all, from the reel Harold Hejazi posted to Instagram.
The house speaks to the fish through onstage controllers. What gets said unlocks levels, reshapes the game world and feeds a myth engine that composes a different legend every night. The working group includes a biologist, Miika Kotila. The theater’s notes say the sea-dwelling grayling has nearly vanished from these waters, and half of the premiere’s ticket proceeds go to the John Nurminen Foundation’s work on the Baltic Sea.
The AI question gets answered up front. Hejazi’s caption says no generative AI made the visuals. AI runs the grayling’s brain and the myth engine, and the rest is, per the post, “lovingly handcrafted.” That is a useful line to draw: the machine is a cast member with one job, improvising with strangers, and people built the sea around it.
It is also the next step for Adventures of Harriharri, the series that took the Digital Moment Award at A MAZE. / Berlin in 2021. In the first episode, Hejazi played from behind the screen and rapped the story. By the third, the crowd was shouting commands and urging one another onstage to take the controller. Now the game listens back. Ten years ago we ran an essay arguing that role-playing games work like medieval oral culture, where a story lives in its retellings and no version is final. Legend of Harri Kala builds that as a venue: a myth that exists only on the nights people turn up to tell it. Team Rolfes is handing its cockpit to audiences in London and New York this month and of course, the ongoing work of Patrick Lim & Daniel Blenkarn's donkey democracy epic asses.masses. The audience as input device is having a moment.
Stills from Legend of Harri Kala: the seabed, a microphone waiting underwater, the Baltic shoreline and the fish at large. Images via Espoo Theatre.
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