At the Grenier à Sel, one of the scenes of the "off", a curious rehearsal is in progress.

"He's maxed out, the Nao" "can you start a Pepper behavior, please?".

Pepper, a humanoid robot with an affable face, is the star of "Bot4Human", a theatrical performance by students from the "We are the Robots" workshop at the École des Mines de Nancy which mixes artistic composition and robotic programming.

A manufacturer decides to recall all of its robots due to a problem, but one of the owners keeps it to continue with its daily tasks.

Little by little, the robot takes control of his life, telling him to come home at such a time, to eat healthy, not to see his girlfriend too much.

A student from the Ecole de Mines de Nancy "dialogues" with the robot Pepper in the show "Bot4Human" as part of the Avignon Festival, July 14, 2022. Clement MAHOUDEAU AFP

"This humanoid robot, we use it like a puppet; all the replicas are pre-programmed to the millimeter, it's artificial theater", explains to AFP the professor of computer science, Patrick Hénaff who is co-piloting the project with a director. , Raphaël Gouisset, and a researcher, Alain Dutech.

Can a robot on stage create emotion?

Unlike cinema and series, especially recently on Netflix, robolution has made very little progress in the world of theater.

"We want the public to ask questions about human-robot interaction. The artists I work with tell me that it's live performance," says the professor.

For Raphaël Gouisset, "the theater has always taken hold of novelties, there have been projectors, video and today robots. These are technical tools, it is not Terminator".

- "IA-author" -

What if artificial intelligence wrote your plays?

This is not exactly what "dSimon" ("digital Simon") is about, but almost.

Uruguayan developer Tammara Leites and Swiss artist Simon Senn pose in front of a text generated by "dSimon" thanks to artificial intelligence during a performance at the Avignon festival, July 14, 2022. Clement MAHOUDEAU AFP

This performance-conference, also given at the Grenier à Sel, is the work of a Uruguayan developer based in Geneva, Tammara Leites and the Swiss visual artist and videographer Simon Senn.

Tammara trained an artificial intelligence to become a writer by giving her the personality of Simon, after integrating her personal data.

Then she creates a site, metastories.ch, on which it is possible to order a text from "dSimon" and to interact with him.

But "the AI-author" sometimes gives completely inappropriate, even offensive answers.

If nothing explains the reasoning of this AI, which even dialogues with an artificial Elon Musk, the experience pushes Simon Senn to plunge into a somewhat frightening introspection.

"What interests me are the emotions that arise from this interaction," says Simon Senn to AFP.

"The theater is the ideal place precisely because we are not in the virtual".

For Tammara Leites, "it's a show about artificial intelligence but it brings out what is most human in us".

The virtual double

Before "dSimon", Simon Senn had designed another, even more disturbing performance: "Be Arielle F".

He tells how he bought online the digital replica of a female body, that of a British student.

He "enters his body" thanks to virtual reality and then goes in search of it.

In a touching scene, he strips naked on stage and sees himself discovering, thanks to virtual reality, a woman's body, which he finds beautiful.

The Swiss artist poses in front of his virtual face designed from the digital replica of a woman's face, as part of the Festival off d'Avignon, July 14, 2022. Clement MAHOUDEAU AFP

The experience raises questions: is he a "gender disorder" or does he have "Snapchat dysmorphia", a psychological disorder that makes you want to look like your image online or the use of filters is massive?

At the end of the performance, the public is entitled to a real exchange with Arielle, the student, via FaceTime, like a return to the human.

© 2022 AFP