S'pore sci-fi play National Memory Project wrestles with seduction of AI
Ellison Tan (left) and Fir Rahman star in National Memory Project, which opens on June 25 and is an update of playwright Johnny Jon Jon's 2012 work. ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
SINGAPORE – Playwright Johnny Jon Jon thinks his 2012 play National Memory Project has not stood the test of time.
In it, the state embarks on a project to collate memories from all its citizens for future reference, transforming the sensuous realm of life into a cold block of nostalgia.
Today, he thinks that nostalgia is no longer as central to understanding such a comprehensive data collection programme, which more urgently calls to mind the swathes of data used to train the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek and Gemini.
'It immediately came to me that it had to be about artificial intelligence (AI),' he says.
So, he has rewritten the script and amped up the science-fiction quality of the play, which will be staged at the Drama Centre Black Box from June 25 to 29.
In the updated version, the Memory Corps collects citizens' memories to feed an AI model designed to understand the nation better than humans ever could.
The efficient and impartial civil servant Judy (Ellison Tan) is tasked to extract memories from Ahmad (Fir Rahman), a man on death row who refuses to be turned into a data point. The play – performed in Malay, English, Hokkien and Mandarin – is directed by Mohd Fared Jainal.
When Jon Jon wrote the play in 2011, he was responding to the Singapore Memory Project, which aimed to collect five million personal memories from Singaporeans for SG50 – what he described as 'an attempt to document memories when we should still be living in those so-called memories'.
Staging the play in another commemorative year – SG60 – Jon Jon thinks the zeitgeist has shifted. He describes the evolution of the play's central conflict: 'In the past, I didn't want to give my memory because I didn't want it to be okay to take away my favourite building. But now, I don't want my memory to contribute to a narrative that I don't necessarily agree with.'
In National Memory Project, the efficient and impartial civil servant Judy (Ellison Tan) is tasked to extract memories from Ahmad (Fir Rahman), a man on death row who refuses to be turned into a data point.
ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE
But lest the premise of his show leads you to think otherwise, Jon Jon is, in fact, an avid AI enthusiast who believes it can be a force for good in the right hands.
He converses with AI on his car rides, plays fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with it and encourages others to experiment with AI – with the caveat that one should not accept it unquestioningly.
And interrogating AI's 'seductive' promise is what Jon Jon does. In the play, for example, Judy's late mother is kept 'alive' as an AI trained on her mother's memory. The scenario is reminiscent of American film-maker Spike Jonze's sci-fi romantic comedy film Her (2013) – except that Jon Jon thinks it is much closer to reality now.
'It's too early to say whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. But I think it will happen sooner rather than later,' he says. More people, he says, citing another example, are already turning to chatbots as their therapists.
Teater Ekamatra's artistic director Shaza Ishak says of the company's first production of its 2025 season: 'This play really connects today because it shows AI as part of our everyday lives, almost like a living character. There's a lot we don't fully understand yet about AI's impact, which adds both hope and uncertainty.'
The play comes at a time when AI is increasingly being adopted in Singapore and not without significant debate – from a study which flags racial, cultural and gender biases in AI models to concerns from creatives about copyright infringement and the impact of AI on learning.
If the earlier version of National Memory Project was more backward-looking – what society has lost – the stakes of this new version are the future – what society might lose .
Jon Jon says: 'Nostalgia is the feeling that you cannot return to the past. This is the feeling that we are past the point of no return.
'If we choose to accept this, I'm not sure whether there is going to be a point where we can say, 'Let just stop this thing.''
Book It/National Memory Project
Where: Drama Centre Black Box, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street
When: June 25 to 27, 8pm; June 28 and 29, 3 and 8pm
Admission: $45, excluding booking fee
Info: str.sg/iDVL
Shawn Hoo is a journalist on the arts beat at The Straits Times. He covers books, theatre and the visual arts.
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