Uploaded May 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Collective life and individual subjectivity are increasingly routed through and constituted by data and digital space. Meanwhile, the use of AI increases in nearly every domain of human endeavor. It is necessary to ask, in this context, how areas of culture that we understand to be deeply human—the arts, creativity, the humanities—will reshape and be reshaped by ever-improving forms of machine intelligence. How might machine learning impact on theater’s capacity to incorporate observations about the human condition? How can theater respond to machine learning? What would it mean to read or write a play composed by artificial intelligence?
Playwright and director Peter Glazer (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley) talks with Catherine Flynn (Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies, UC Berkeley) about AIrish, Flynn's research project that blends traditional and digital humanities methods to explore Irish drama from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The conversation focuses on an undergraduate seminar Flynn taught during the Spring 2021 semester on a set of Irish plays, using computational analyses to enhance the discussions of dramatic works that span 250 years. Flynn and Glazer also discuss the plays the students composed using lines from plays on the syllabus, lines composed by an AI text-generator, and lines of their own composition.
For details, visit: https://ies.berkeley.edu/irish/airish
AIrish is generously supported by the Irish Government Emigrant Support Programme.
Collective life and individual subjectivity are increasingly routed through and constituted by data and digital space. Meanwhile, the use of AI increases in nearly every domain of human endeavor. It is necessary to ask, in this context, how areas of culture that we understand to be deeply human—the arts, creativity, the humanities—will reshape and be reshaped by ever-improving forms of machine intelligence. How might machine learning impact on theater’s capacity to incorporate observations about the human condition? How can theater respond to machine learning? What would it mean to read or write a play composed by artificial intelligence?
Playwright and director Peter Glazer (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley) talks with Catherine Flynn (Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies, UC Berkeley) about AIrish, Flynn's research project that blends traditional and digital humanities methods to explore Irish drama from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. The conversation focuses on an undergraduate seminar Flynn taught during the Spring 2021 semester on a set of Irish plays, using computational analyses to enhance the discussions of dramatic works that span 250 years. Flynn and Glazer also discuss the plays the students composed using lines from plays on the syllabus, lines composed by an AI text-generator, and lines of their own composition.
For details, visit: https://ies.berkeley.edu/irish/airish
AIrish is generously supported by the Irish Government Emigrant Support Programme.
