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Straits Times

Theatre review: Imperfect National Memory Project captures the voice of an artist in two minds about AI

Theatre review: Imperfect National Memory Project captures the voice of an artist in two minds about AI National Memory Project Teater Ekamatra Drama Centre Black Box June 25, 8pm This circuitous two-hander set in not-so-distant Singapore is playwright Johnny Jon Jon's futile tussle with the relentless march of Artificial Intelligence, its indisputable efficacy making all counter-arguments appear trivial and moot. The audience can almost see him arguing around himself, rehashing familiar thrust and parries ad infinitum. It is dense with ideas, incorporating also a slightly out-of-place mention of authorities' plans to train a South-east Asia-sensitive large language model using authors' works. Confused wrangling is par of the course for this disruptive technology. The unsatisfactory conclusion only proves the uphill battle creatives face, persuading both others and their own hearts that the individual matters, and that public policy should not merely be a numbers game. The abstract, Escher -inspired stairs forming the set is the work of director Mohd Fared Jainal. It serves as home base of the national AI office, prison cell and maze of civil servant Judy's (Ellison Tan) memories. Its metaphorical gesture at the illusion of progress is clear, but also makes for a kind of theatre green screen on which bulbs are scattered. The coloured lights are at different points turned up high to overwhelm the entire stage in white, yellow and blue. It is a nifty device in scene-shifting that leans into the play's futuristic, sci-fi occupations. Right from the start , Judy is seen communicating with an AI-version of her dead mother, capable of asking why her daughter is working late nights and who makes virtual coffee, an eerie presence backed by the sounds of bubbling water and kitchenware being moved. Judy works for a national agency that is training an AI to make sure 'all systems are simply go', able to pre-empt trouble and unfailingly raise red flags – such as those missed in the death of four-year-old Megan Khung, parsed in detail by news media in 2025 and name-checked here. In a democratic impulse put upon her by her superiors, her task is to coax a memory – any memory – out of death row inmate, the uncooperative Ahmad (Fir Rahman). The latter understands but refuses to speak the bureaucratic language of English and converses only in Malay – a language gag that allows for some jokes. Rahman also doubles as Judy's determined superior, a role he plays with a strange, maladriot soft-spokenness, not wholly intentionally. But he makes thorough points about how contributing memories to the AI is an effort at creating a system more attuned to locals' needs, at a time when Western and Chinese models predominate – a sort of office mantra. There are as well reflections on the pointlessness of memories shorn of their original contexts or shoehorned to fit national directives; and the unceasing development of forward-looking Singapore, which is as merciless now in embracing the new as when it first moved pig farm dwellers into Housing Board flats. The most thought-provoking is Jon Jon's pitch that maybe the process of losing memories is an organic process of attrition – just like the falling out of teeth – and renewal. This right to forget, crucial to sanity, has been obliterated by technology's rapacious ability to catalogue and absorb. The AI that is Judy's mother glitches with too much input, unable to discern strands of memory and even the language she speaks. She finally resorts to motherhood cliches – undiscriminating collection does not so much nuance the picture as render it meaningless. But where then does that leave national memory? Jon Jon's answer is that this is always personal, though this reviewer thinks there may still be value in a collective narrative rooted in nuance, care and generational respect. The play's secret genius may be in having the characters' sketch out drawings on the stage's white surfaces as they talk, mostly unreferenced in dialogue. This exercise of carving the lines to recall memory and process grief escapes the reach of AI, able to reproduce images but not replicate the emotions in their creation: from using drawing to avoid eye contact to the smearing of it in choosing to move on. Art is an intangible memory resource too, and sometimes, it is okay that it is lost. National Memory Project is one such imperfect work, full of contradictions for a confusing age. Book It/National Memory Project Ellison Tan and Fir Rahman in National Memory Project PHOTO: JOHNNY JON JON Where: Drama Centre Black Box, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street When: June 26, 27, 8pm; June 28 and 29, 3 and 8pm Admission: $45, excluding booking fee Info: Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.