Machine Symphony & After AGI : Two Visions of Creation in the Age of the Machine
Two Opera of the Future students, Treyden Chiaravalloti and Antonis Christou, present a compelling double bill bringing together two original works that consider the same question from distinct perspectives—one shaped by a hand-built orchestra of AI-embedded instruments, the other an original musical set ten years into the future.
Machine Symphony is a live performance by composer and multi-instrumentalist Antonis Christou. Playing entirely alone, Antonis performs with an orchestra of his own invention, including, among others, hacked children’s toys, a robotic drum kit, a microtonal arcade machine, and at the center of it all, the Automatar— a custom-built string instrument with an NVIDIA GPU physically embedded inside it, capable of understanding how it's being played and harmonizing back by physically vibrating its own strings. There are no pre-recorded tracks. Everything you hear is played, sampled, or live-coded in the moment - an act of creation with deeply inhuman tools used towards a deeply human end.
After AGI: The Techno-Apocalypse Musical, set in 2034, it follows Theos, a disillusioned AI engineer hiding in a bunker after the technology he helped build begins to fracture the world. His only companion, CLEO, is an AI mental health companion he built a decade earlier and trained on his late sister's writing. As Theos retreats into making music to survive, a violent anti-AI movement strikes his former mentor and sends Theos a warning: he's next. He has to decide whether to risk his life for what he believes, or become another victim of the noise.
Together, these two works shape an evening that probes what art becomes as machines emerge as creative agents in their own right.