Félix and Romulus met at Paris Nanterre, where putting an AI engineer and a theatre director in the same Master’s in Mise en scène et dramaturgie turned out to be another small failure of institutional risk assessment. Romulus was already obsessed with dragging technology into theatre; Félix had the considerably more dangerous quality of actually knowing how to do it. Their first collaboration was Jon Fosse’s I Am the Wind, where Félix came onboard as technical director and they immediately began fucking with FM transmitters, radios, sound, video and an old analog television, discovering somewhere in the process that they shared an unhealthy excitement for taking perfectly functional technologies and making them do things they were absolutely not designed to do.

The problem escalated. What began with Fosse and some abused electronics turned into long conversations about AI, obsolete machines, technophany, media archaeology and whether the future might actually become more interesting if you forced it through the technological corpses of the past. Soon they were feeding digital material through analog systems, resurrecting cathode-ray televisions, building their own radio transmissions and plotting ways of making AI physically haunt a stage. Then somebody made the catastrophic administrative error of selecting them for EXPAND, an international programme specifically designed to give artists access to XR and AI technologies, which meant that instead of being told to stop, Félix and Romulus were given partners, laboratories and a route through Avignon, Finland, Romania and eventually Cannes.

Until then, their respective forms of nerdiness had remained relatively distinct. Romulus was the theatre nerd who could disappear into Shakespeare, dramaturgy and dead European men for several days; Félix was the computer nerd who could say things like “semantic web,” “knowledge graph” and “local inference” without immediately being removed from the building. EXPAND destroyed this delicate ecosystem. Romulus started learning what was inside the machines, Félix kept crawling deeper into theatre, and somewhere between rehearsals, code, philosophy, wires and increasingly deranged conversations about what exactly constitutes reality, the two began competing for intellectual territory nobody else particularly wanted.

It took one Norwegian existentialist, several mutilated electronic devices, an international AI programme, an alarming quantity of theory and two grown men arguing about whether the apocalypse should run on analog hardware before Félix finally crossed the point of no return. The engineer had become an artist, the artist had become a hacker-poet, the hacker-poet was now trying to rewire reality itself, and there was only one organisation irresponsible enough to encourage this behaviour.

FÉLIX PAGÈS BECAME A DOOMSDAY LOVER.

Reality has been experiencing technical difficulties ever since. The matter will be settled after the collapse of civilisation.