“Static Head,” the new show from Emory University Playwriting Fellow Ryan Stevens, began with a bang. Various actors’ voices reverberated throughout the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts Theater Lab while simultaneously, a 360-degree spotlight projected vibrant colors and strobe lights.
Reflecting on the Feb. 20-23 performances, Stevens described the play as a “paranoid, social media thriller.” The play explored the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) evolution and its potential implications for everyday life. “Static Head” followed the effects of a fictitious app, “Sensor-E” as the app incorporated its users’ senses to fully immerse them in the social media experience. The play takes place on a computer science college campus. Stevens noted the show is centered around the intersection between technology and human connections, commenting on social media’s overwhelming and all-consuming nature.
“My main takeaway for the audience is that these technological advances can't stand in the way of real human endeavors,” Stevens said. “In a perfect world, people would see this and no one would ever use ChatGPT or any of that garbage again. I realize that’s wishful thinking, but I do want people to put more of a focus on not outsourcing their own emotions or their own thoughts to these computers that really are, as we say in the play, ‘a mouth without a brain.’”
After the opening sequence, “Static Head” introduced the three main characters. The play revolved around Aimee (Francis Marquez (28C)), a grieving young student, Paige (Pluto Clinkscales (23Ox, 25C)), who viewed the app as a window to the outside world due to a chronic illness and Blair (Ben Soffer (26C)), an aspiring influencer who goes by the social media handle “Truth-or-Blair.”
The show’s plot focused on a social media craze known as the “Static-Head Challenge,” in which unsuspecting students turn off the Sensor-E app’s safety settings to become overwhelmed by each of their five senses. Raising their phones close to their faces, all the lights in the room were shut off, and the students were consumed by “static,” referencing how the scrambling of their brains blurs the line between what is real and what is fake.
Aimee, Paige and Blair all had different relationships with social media. While Aimee saw the apps as dangerous, Blair viewed Sensor E as his livelihood and Paige wielded the app to better understand the world around them. All three characters were exposed to “static,” which left them stuck together in the technology interface, desperate for a way out of a repetitive social media loop.
Ibi Owolabi, the director of “Static Head,” experimented with different visuals to present the Sensor-E app, including using projections to showcase the characters’ screens. However, the end product involved allowing the actors to perform the scenes revolving around social media themselves. These scenes began in the second act where each character acted out familiar social media trends, such as a point-of-view video and TikTok’s gentle reminders to users to stop scrolling. While the action of “doom-scrolling” was not explicitly shown to the audience, the inescapable nature of a carefully crafted For You Page was evident.
At the show's conclusion, numerous plot points of “Static Head” were left open-ended, leaving the audience to rely on their interpretations. In particular, the play never revealed whether the three main characters manage to escape the clutches of the “static” or if they are still drifting through a false reality weaponized by AI.
Marquez, who played Aimee, hoped the show left the audience with questions, potentially inspiring their own opinions about its message.
“I hope people really think about the story and gather their own interpretations of what happened and how each character develops, what their stories are and theories about the whole thing,” Marquez said. “It’s a very open-ended show, so everyone’s interpretations are correct.”
Stevens expressed gratitude to Owolabi, the actors and designers who worked on “Static Head” and said they “could not have done it alone.”
Members of the audience left the show with lingering thoughts on modern AI issues, such as the rise of AI-generated art and remarkably realistic deep fakes. Isabelle Lefand (28C), who was in the audience during one of the shows, emphasized how the play made her reconsider the ethicality of AI and its consequences.
“I've always thought that AI can be very helpful to people that use it correctly, and this was one of the instances where it's obviously not used very correctly, very ethically,” Lefand said. “It is a little bit scary in that fact, to see what actually could happen if AI got into the wrong hands.”
