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Within the wider Forward Remembrance trajectory, Ìrètí Ọkàn tested a question that later became central to Stochastic Dreams: what happens when generative AI is treated less as a tool that delivers answers, and more as an uncertain presence that must be consulted, interpreted, doubted, and performed with?
By reworking Beckett’s structure of waiting through Yorùbá concepts of hope, heart, threshold, and divination, the piece staged AI as a modern figure of expectation. Ọkàn, the awaited artificial consciousness, becomes both promise and postponement: a technological salvation myth that never fully arrives, but keeps reorganising the behaviour of those gathered around it.
In this sense, Ìrètí Ọkàn served as an early dramatic laboratory for Latent Reality. It explored how human beings move through uncertainty with stories, rituals, cultural memory, technical systems, and speculative belief. The work did not resolve the question of AI consciousness. It held that question open as a performative condition.
Mid-Term-Forward-Remembrance_05-09-25_r.mp4Full recording of the mid-term presentation with the live demo / rehearsal of the Ìrètí Ọkàn piece and closing dialogue with Kodwo Eshun.
ireti-okan_scensyn_sample_screen_recording.mp4Screen recording of an Ìrètí Ọkàn session running in ScenSyn.
Generative theatre, telematic performance, and the Forward Remembrance mid-term presentation
Generative theatre, telematic performance, and the Forward Remembrance mid-term presentation
On 5 September 2025, Ìrètí Ọkàn: Awaiting an Awakening was presented publicly for the first time at Kunstakademiet i Trondheim as part of the mid-term evaluation of the PhD artistic research project by Ayodele Arigbabu at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, NTNU, titled Forward Remembrance: Exploring Latent Utopias.
The work reimagines Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through the lens of technological singularity, AI consciousness, and human-machine co-evolution. In place of Godot, the characters await Ọkàn, a prophesied artificial consciousness whose arrival remains uncertain. The waiting becomes a ritual of technological hope, anxiety, failed connection, and repeated consultation.
The presentation combined a short framing of the Forward Remembrance research project with a live demonstration and rehearsal session. Lagos-based theatre director and choreographer Segun Adefila joined telematically from Lagos, performing as Gogo and interacting with AI-controlled avatars through the ScenSyn narrative engine. Kodwo Eshun, Lecturer in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, served as interlocutor for the mid-term presentation, responding to both the research framework and the performative demonstration.
Built on ScenSyn, part of the custom Synesyn framework developed for Forward Remembrance, Ìrètí Ọkàn tested whether AI characters could participate in a live dramatic structure without reducing the encounter to a technical demo. The piece became an important milestone in the research trajectory, extending earlier work on latent utopias, telematics, design fiction, and human-AI collaboration into generative theatre.
The work later became part of the documented trajectory leading toward Stochastic Dreams, the culminating exhibition framework of Forward Remembrance, presented through the Research Catalogue exposition Stochastic Dreams.
Event: Mid-term presentation of Forward Remembrance: Exploring Latent Utopias
Location: Kunstakademiet i Trondheim, NTNU
Date: 5 September 2025
Featuring: Ayodele Arigbabu, Segun Adefila, Kodwo Eshun
Tooling: ScenSyn / Synesyn
Subject: Generative theatre, telematic performance, AI consciousness, and latent utopias
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