“The Minutes” was improvisational theatre experimentation at the Arena Theatre at Cal State LA that centered on the East Los Angeles 1968 walkouts, and the dismissal and reinstatement of legendary educator Sal Castro. All shows sold out days before opening night, and the performances were received with great enthusiasm.
“The Minutes” took the minutes of the LAUSD Board of Education meetings from August 29 to September 12, 1968, as a starting point to investigate and reveal power structures inherent in space and social structure. Based on these minutes, as well as film archive footage, 10 acting students, musicians, a stage crew and a camera team, created a live improvisation of history.
At the same time, five computer sciences students worked—and still work—on a video game called “Race Against the Machine” implemented in spring 2020. This steampunk game combines social criticism with humor and gameplay. The game is set in a surreal version of the world of the civil rights movement of 1968. The game design team aims to develop an AI bot based on the language games derived from the improvisational theatre. During the live performances, all improvised language and historic speech were transcribed in real time. A simple algorithm called “Markov Chain” was used to filter keywords to comprise the core of the played scenes. One of these “Markov Chains” sounds like this:
“we’re not happy I was great political opposition and so tell me what demand at work have you? expecting you know Mexican teach how about that I was aware they were doing the right think the school did you were not home what myself tell I’ll go something beautiful you know my house you work have a felon you can’t be a freshman I wasn’t know about us this school disrespecting your school? already broken you kind of education we want that myself tell I’m trying to work have you? know Julian Nava he color of the students and I wasn’t know the feel like if I wasn’t like sweat it smelled like OK I’ll he doesn’t suppose we give to drag us out feet first yeah the police car on our wife and so late I just like it smelled by a system that it smelled them they dug into our wrists the feeling of the your house I see and so telling there as much a criminal system what doing is more important than you look good yes?”
The algorithm language was played back during the performance so that it could be used as a feedback loop. This way and by means of spatial story design, the performers explored the narrative determinations of space and (historic) situations. They were looking into what are the driving forces and underlying power structures of society and how does personal memory and group dynamics feed into our collective experience and consciousness.
The project produced an abundance of interdisciplinary research in the field of digital humanities. Already more than 40 student papers have analyzed and discussed a variety of aspects such as linguistics and power, Chicanx history, politics of knowledge production, issues of human-machine interaction, interactive storytelling and game design.
The students were able to develop and deepen their improvisational skills as a collaborative framework to explore teamwork and collective investigations of social relations. They currently examine the impact of institutional language patterns with artificial intelligence and evaluate the efficiency of model-making as a means of learning and representation.