May the Machine Live Within Me 

A veritable laboratory with four pairs of hands, this collaboration sees a musician, a roboticist, a writer and an AI entity attempt to create a film together in a piece combining queer performance, live writing, hacking, and transhumanism. 

In Que la machine vive en moi (May the Machine Live Within Me), Romane Nicolas and her “transfeminist cyborgs” take the audience on an adventure equal parts hilarious and troubling, as they let AI write the script of a blockbuster that will blow Hollywood out of the water. 

The work is created anew every evening from exchanges between human beings and machines. An artificial – and hacked – intelligence entity provides random combinations and the improbable happens. A meeting between Barbie, Terminator and Karl Marx, for example. 

Cover © Illustration – Que la machine vive en moi, Jérôme Foubert

Production

Voice-performance: Lux
Video management: Arthur Vervier-Dasque
Administration, production, and distribution: Héloïse Gaubert and Delphine Guérin
Production: Groupe Scalpel

Co-production: Théâtre Sorano, Scène conventionnée – Toulouse; Le Tracteur – Cintegabelle, Haute-Garonne

Residencies and partners: Festival Démostratif, La Chartreuse CNES – Villeneuve lez Avignon, Fond Transfem Révolutionnaire, Théâtre Jules-Julien – Toulouse, University of Toulouse 1 Capitole, Festival Fragments

Special thanks to Yves Duthen and Paule Géry.

A work-in-progress version of this show was presented as part of the Fragments #12 Festival (La Loge).

This show received the Occitanie Livre et Lecture Prize.