TOSBOT

An artist duo, a group of creative people, and a specially trained AI language model are behind this vaguely post-apocalyptic performance in a realisation of life.

Saloranta & de Vylder is an artistic collaboration between Sara de Vylder and Olle Strandberg Colling. With TOSBOT, they wanted to create a performance that stepped outside their own creative framework. We follow a musician, an opera singer, and an acrobat in a realisation of life. Through choreography, song, and acrobatics, we meet the characters in their emotions and human commitments—like starting a band, selling insurance at an airport, or describing the inscrutability of existence.

TOSBOT is partly created by a specially trained AI language model fed with Olle Strandberg Collings’s collected texts. The language model was named Educated Ether and was trained to write scene descriptions and instructions. Educated Ether created raw script material, which was then interpreted by a creative team led by Saloranta & de Vylder. Educated Ether named the performance “This is the Still Place Presents: Tomorrow Officially Sucks but Today is the Best. Or “TOSBOT” for short.

Saloranta & de Vylder share artistic leadership and are behind the crypto circus project The Sphere, The Cloud Jump, AKA The Broken Neck Jump, the collaboration and innovation hub Den Fantastiska Platsen, and numerous circus and performing arts productions.

After the performance of Friday 16 February, Olle Strandberg Colling and Sara deVylder invite the audience to stay for an aftertalk in the foyer of the theater.