With a classical background in piano and composition, João Carlos Pinto deepened his interest in multimedia during a master’s program at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre in Germany. Since then, his work has been steeped in technology and hybrid formats, exploring techno-animism and cyber-spirituality, which has led him away from the conventional concert format in favour of performance-based live shows. “A1-0 N3” is the most ambitious expression of this: an epic music-theatre piece, sci-fi and techno-futurist, centring on artificial intelligence and the potential of singing as a point of contact between the spontaneity of a robot and that of a human. Between the software and glitches of the digital world, and the sweat and tears from the human side, “A1-0 N3” examines the ambiguities of our present and proposes a future quite different from the one that capital and markets want us to believe is the only possibility.

Commissioned by Semibreve under Re-Imagine Europe, a programme co-funded by the European Union