Yesterday Tomorrow²⁰¹⁵

Yesterday Tomorrow is a kind of musical, a collaboration between human artists and evolutionary algorithms. In this work, a trio of live singers are fed a real-time algorithmically-generated score to create an environmental concert of song, software, gesture, light, and space. Inspired by a kind of artificial intelligence known as evolutionary computation, Yesterday Tomorrow gives a unique experience of the complexity and unpredictability of the present tense contrasted with the known past and the imagined future.

Beginning with the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” algorithms slowly transform that song into “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie. Three singers receive the computer-generated music and lyrics both aurally and visually, and follow a movement score, also produced algorithmically, that moves them from a starting to an ending position. Each night, the spatial and musical path from the past to the future is different; neither the singers, the creative team, nor the audience knows where we will end up.

The singers onstage and the computer generated melodies and lyrics blend to create a disorienting series of alternations: between human and machine, between sound and sense, between the recognizable and the utterly unfamiliar. Finally and eventually, it’s a piece about the passage of time, about progress and regress, about the loss of one world and the optimistic creation of another.