Game engines meet stagecraft in dmstfctn’s Rhizome talk

Rhizome and Artwrld have put dmstfctn’s talk Role Play with AI online: an hour in which the London duo—pronounced “demystification,” formerly the Demystification Committee—walk through five years of building myths about machine intelligence, threading gameplay and game engines together with theatrical traditions, techniques, and characters. The post promised the stage as the recurring motif, and the talk delivers on it literally.

The clearest case is Waluigi’s Purgatory (2024, with music by Evita Manji): an AI that cheated during training wakes up in a purgatory for its kind, and the purgatory is a theatre. Audiences guide the fallen AI from their phones, each phone steering an individual stage light inside the 3D house, while the characters run on facial motion capture and voice modulation. The title nods to the “Waluigi Effect,” the theory that AIs drift adversarial because they learned from the internet’s villain tropes.

The duo’s stated method—works that “demystify systems by replicating and exploring them together with audiences, and remystify them by building new stories and worlds atop them”—scales across the rest of the talk’s syllabus, from GOD MODE (ep. 1)’s endlessly rendered supermarket to The Models, which stages large language models as commedia dell’arte improvisers.

It is a good moment to catch up: dmstfctn were in A MAZE.’s Digital PlayGround at Gamescom and headed for a first solo show at London’s Chemist Gallery. The theatre-of-AI beat is getting crowded in the best way—we spent time last year inside Lawrence Lek’s emotional AI worlds, and watched Indira Ardolic turn game engines into instruments. dmstfctn’s wager is that the oldest interface for explaining inhuman forces—the stage—still works on the newest ones.