In 2022, I was approached by Martin Grünheit, a member of the Berlin-based theater collective cobratheater.cobra, to collaborate on a modern-day reimagining of the Bauernkriegspanorama, an enormous 360-degree painting depicting the Peasants' Revolt (Bauernkrieg) of 1524. The painting has a fascinating history that spans several moments in time: the 16th-century peasant revolution it portrays, the late-GDR context in which it was commissioned, and the present moment of political turmoil from which we now observe it.
Our reimagining of the painting was presented as a kind of "happening" at Theater Eisleben on March 23, 2024, with various events and installations spread throughout the theater. My contribution, created in collaboration with Martin and writer Hieu Hoang, was a "memory pool" filled with stories from people who had lived and grown up near Eisleben. These memories were collected during community workshops led by Martin and Hieu in 2023 and early 2024.
The memory pool is set in a "Living Room" filled with memorabilia, suffused with a soft drone and the sound of glass shards echoing throughout the space. (The soundscape was inspired by a visit to a slag heap—one of many hills formed from the glass-like detritus of centuries of copper mining.) Visitors are invited to share a memory by speaking into a microphone. When they do, three related recorded memories emerge from the glass shards and echo back at them:
These memories are selected using AI—specifically, a sentence-similarity model. The meanings of all the recorded memories are embedded into a high-dimensional vector space. When a visitor speaks, their words are transcribed, vectorized, and compared with all the recorded memories. The three most similar are selected for playback. Although I am quite ambivalent about AI in general, I am captivated by the intuitive, associative power of deep neural networks to draw human-like connections between ideas.
The Living Room of Memories harnesses this power to create a voice-guided archive—a kind of magical artifact that contains the collective experiences of a community from a particular time and place, waiting to be activated by a visitor's own experiences.