Latest news with #DeadAir
News18
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- News18
Allu Arjun's Daughter Arha Playfully Questions Lakshmi Manchu's Accent, Video Goes Viral
Last Updated: Taking to her Instagram handle, Lakshmi Manchu shared a video in which she is seen having conversation with Allu Arjun's daughter Arha. Allu Arjun's daughter, Allu Arha, recently won hearts with her adorable charm and wit. The young star kid left netizens in splits when a video surfaced online of her hilariously questioning actress and TV host Lakshmi Manchu about her accent, and the internet can't get enough of it! Taking to her Instagram handle, Lakshmi Manchu shared a video where she is seen conversing with Allu Arjun's daughter Arha. Allu Arjun's baby girl is seen asking her, 'Nuvvu Telugu ne na?" (Are you even Telugu?). Suddenly, Lakshmi bursts into laughter, assuring Arha that she is indeed Telugu and asking her what made her think otherwise. Arha's response, 'Nee accent atla undi" (Your accent is like that though), sparking laughter from everyone around, including her dad, Allu Arjun, who playfully asked, 'Why did you even ask her that?" Watch the video here: Lakshmi Manchu was last seen in the romantic thriller television series, Yakshini, featuring Vedhika, Rahul Vijay, Ajay, Vadlamani Srinivas and Dayanand Reddy in significant roles. The show premiered on the OTT platform JioHotstar. On the film front, she is known for her performances in films like The Ode, Dead Air, Dongala Mutha, Size Zero, Guntur Talkies and others. Allu Arjun was most recently seen in the blockbuster movie Pushpa 2: The Rule and his iconic character of Pushpa Raj has been etched in the hearts of millions. Coming to Allu Arjun's upcoming projects, the actor is busy with several high-profile films. He has started shooting for a futuristic sci-fi action thriller, tentatively titled AA22xA6. Helmed by director Atlee, the action entertainer promises cutting-edge visual effects that could be a game-changer for Indian sci-fi cinema. Besides Allu Arjun, Mrunal Thakur and Deepika Padukone are part of the film. Fans will also see Arjun star in Trivikram Srinivas's pan-India socio-mythological fantasy film. Touted to be a mythological drama with a contemporary twist, this film marks another collaboration between the actor and director. He will also reprise his iconic role of Pushpa in the highly anticipated sequel, Pushpa 3. Meanwhile, a fresh wave of speculation recently hit the internet, suggesting that Allu Arjun might step into the iconic role of Shaktimaan in the upcoming big-screen adaptation of the beloved 90s superhero series. First Published: August 07, 2025, 18:12 IST Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From chatbot apocalypse to a bespoke romance about the family cat: Edinburgh gets creative with AI
Every new technology unsettles us because it confuses our boundaries. The radio announcer who appears in our living room; the movie star we see on a screen; the relative's voice we hear on a phone: they all mix up our sense of the real and the imagined. So it is with artificial intelligence. A poem generated instantly by ChatGPT feels as magical to us – and as magically wrong – as the first printed books must have done to an illiterate population, unschooled in mystical Latin. How to account for something that communicates like a human being, yet is not physically present? It is an uncertainty that haunts the AI-themed plays on this year's Edinburgh fringe. It also accounts for their apocalyptic mood. Do we even have a future, they all seem to ask, or are we bequeathing it to the machines? Take Dead Air, in which playwright Alfrun Rose stars as Alfie, a kind of female Hamlet. Like Shakespeare's vacillating hero, she communes with her dead father and grows furious with her mother for hooking up with a new man, John, an old boyfriend. As Alfie sees it, John is in line to become her stepfather with unseemly haste. The difference with Hamlet is that her dad is no ghost but an AI simulacrum, powered by a service called AiR. For as long as she pays the subscription (no easy feat), Alfie can hang on to her dead dad and hang on, too, to her sense of survivor's guilt and unfinished business. The online service, with its chirpy operatives and Stayin' Alive hold music, supplies her with a nearly-but-not-quite reproduction of the real man. If something feels off, she can switch the temperature controls to turn him from mechanical to fanciful. Whether he is a comforting replacement or a cynical means of data mining is a moot point. The question Rose raises in an absorbing storytelling show is less about the limits of digital technology and more about processing grief. Alfie's fury with her mother and rage about John is little to do with them (they seem as perplexed by her outbursts as Gertrude and Claudius are by Hamlet's) and a lot to do with her miscarriages. Conflating the death of her father with the loss of her children, she is frozen into inaction. Having a virtual father only prolongs her inertia. Whatever this AI father is, however lifelike, he can never be the real thing. The AI chatbot played by Elisabeth Gunawan in Stampin' in the Graveyard also purports to have our interests at heart. She is there, she explains, authentically stiff-jointed, to ease our transition to the end of the world. Her name is Rose and if she starts hallucinating, as AI is wont to do, a rose graphic flashes up on screen. Through an interface that is all glitches, network errors and messages saying 'Not applicable is not applicable at this time', she polls the audience to guide her through optional storylines. Each show plays out with a different combination of scenes in a tech-savvy production co-created with movement director Matej Matejka for Kiss Witness. Hard to say what the story adds up to – it is a catastrophic tale that begins with a couple seeking marriage guidance from a vending machine and ends with forced separations and closed airports – but it is fascinatingly done with the audience tuning in on headphones and Gunawan playing a steampunk synth-accordion hybrid created from recycled electronics. If this is the future, we are in for a world of computer errors and digital indifference, a hostile place for our messy human interactions. Tackling the technology even more directly, New York's Angry Fish Theater and the Ally Artists Group use AI to generate a bespoke script for each spectator. Before the start of AI: The Waiting Room – An Audiovisual Journey, you fill in a questionnaire, truthfully or otherwise, about your ambitions, loved ones and legacy. By the time you are in the theatre, there is a custom-built story ready to play out in your headphones, delivered by a freakily realistic voice. The sections unique to you are folded into a bigger tale, experienced by everyone, about societal breakdown and hi-tech rejuvenation. Nobody else will ever hear my yarn about a sugary moon, a bag of gold and 61 statues. This is a good thing, much as I enjoyed the novelty of hearing a romantic story about me and the family cat. All this takes place as we move freely around a studio, watching a monochrome animation (perhaps also artificially generated) and following instructions intended to make us play characters in our stories. These demands for audience participation seem forced – especially a misjudged prompt to 'dance party?' – but it is a quirkily intriguing attempt to be humanly creative with this inhuman technology. Dead Air is at Pleasance Courtyard until 24 August. Stampin' in the Graveyard is at Summerhall until 25 August. AI: The Waiting Room – An Audiovisual Journey is at Studio at C Arts until 16 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Scotsman
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Ghosts, grief and glitches: Dead Air explores AI, loss and the dgital afterlife
Alfrun Rose's debuts a darkly comic solo show bringing tech horror and emotional truth to the Edinburgh Fringe. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Can algorithms help you grieve? Or do they just keep the dead alive a little longer? Maybe even too long... Writer and performer Alfrun Rose goes looking for answers, and her own father, via a chatbot trained to mimic the voices of the dead. The result is a darkly comic, emotionally gripping one-woman show, exploring mourning in an age where technology rules. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad After her much loved dad passes away, Rose found herself spiralling down digital rabbit holes, looking to old recordings, voice notes and even to AI services. Rose believed it was comforting at first. And then... Alfrun Rose blurs the line between memory and machine in Dead Air. When one AI system hallucinated that the deceased was "burning in hell", the idea for Dead Air was born. A modern ghost story, not written about Alfrun Rose's father, but written for him. By Alfrun Rose 30th July – 24th August, Bunker One – Pleasance Courtyard, @ 11:40, (60 min)
New York Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rutherford Chang, Who Turned Collections Into Art, Dies at 45
Rutherford Chang, a conceptual artist who turned his collection of the Beatles' 'White Album' into a meditation on the aging of a vinyl classic — and who, in another project, melted down 10,000 pennies into a copper block to make a statement about the value of each red cent — died on Jan. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 45. His sister Danielle Chang said that a specific cause would not be determined for several months. Mr. Chang's projects were the fruit of a playful, obsessive mind. In 'Andy Forever' he and a colleague edited all of the Hong Kong movie star Andy Lau's death scenes, in chronological order of the films' release, into a 27-minute video. In another video, 'Dead Air,' he removed all the words from President George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech (including those about the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein's ambitions to build nuclear and biological weapons), leaving only his pauses, his breaths and the applause from the House chamber. And he cut and pasted a 2004 front page of The New York Times, rearranging all the text into alphabetical order. Some of it, when read aloud, sounds like Yoda, the 'Star Wars' character who spoke in an idiosyncratic style. One headline read, 'a Abuse Aide And Clash General on Rumsfeld.' 'He was obsessive, but not compulsive,' Ms. Chang, his sister, said. 'He was a collector. His apartment is so orderly, with nothing out of place, but he threw nothing away.' Mr. Chang was not initially a collector of the 1968 double LP 'The Beatles,' better known as 'The White Album.' He bought one copy of it as a teenager, but when he got a second one some years later, he realized that the two — with their plain white covers as blank canvases— had changed over time. 'The more I got, the more I could see how different these once identical objects had become,' he told the website The Creative Independent in 2017. 'I didn't know where it was going when I started other than that I wanted at least enough to see the differences between them. Then it just kept going and I can't stop.' Mr. Chang's installation, 'We Buy White Albums,' unveiled at the Recess gallery in Manhattan in 2013, took the form of a facsimile of a record shop, with albums in bins and turntables to play the music. One wall was filled with albums whose owners had put their names on the covers, as well as written letters, poems and other ephemera on them. Some had drawn pictures. The covers also showed wear patterns created by rotting cardboard. 'Each album has aged uniquely and become an artifact of the last half-century,' Mr. Chang told the website Hyperallergic in 2013. The exhibition — which traveled to several cities, including Liverpool, the home of the Beatles, in 2014 — also had an audio component. When he listened to copies of 'The White Album' at the gallery, Mr. Chang used a professional recording device connected to the turntables to make a digital recording; he later had a studio electronically layer 100 of them into a pressing of 1,000 vinyl records, with all the static, scratches and skips of the original recordings. He sold some copies for $20 each and traded others for more 'White Albums' (his collection reached 3,417 copies). He also posted some of the audio on his website. His vinyl record offered a unique spin on 'The White Album.' Variations in the factory pressings and fluctuations in the speed of Mr. Chang's turntable caused oddities, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times in 2013: 'At the start of 'Dear Prudence,' you hear the first line echoing several times, and by 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' the track is a nearly unrecognizable roar.' Rutherford Chang was born on Dec. 27, 1979, in Houston to parents from Taiwan and grew up in Los Altos Hills, Calif., near Palo Alto. His father, Jason, is a founder of ASE Technology Holding, a semiconductor company, and his mother, Ching Ping (Hsiang) Chang, is a retired interior designer. Rutherford's earliest collection, when he was a child, was of the small stickers that come with fruit, which he used to decorate a binder. Throughout his life, he would collect many other things: baseball bats, hotel stationery, postcards, old Chinese megaphones, years' worth of receipts. 'He had a unique way of looking at the world,' Ms. Chang said. 'He saw beauty in everyday objects.' After majoring in psychology while taking art courses at Wesleyan University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 2002, he was an assistant to the artist Xu Bing in Manhattan for two years. He then worked on his own projects in Singapore and Beijing. In 2008, he clipped about 4,000 ink-dot portraits from The Wall Street Journal, then reassembled them in alphabetical order into a yearbook-like publication he called 'The Class of 2008.' He repeated several portraits; Barack Obama, who was elected president of the United States that year, appears 94 times, and John McCain, his Republican opponent, appears 74 times. When it was exhibited at the White Space Gallery in Beijing in 2012, The Journal called Mr. Chang's project an 'illuminating window into the priorities and thought processes of The Journal as it sought to document the year's events.' Mr. Chang turned his fascination with video games into performance art: In 2016, he livestreamed on the platform Twitch his attempt to achieve the world's highest score in Game Boy Tetris, the 1990s puzzle game. By then, he had been playing Tetris since childhood (his goal was to beat the score of Steve Wozniak, a founder of Apple) and recorded more than 1,700 videos of his game playing. The videos were exhibited at the Container, a gallery in Tokyo, also in 2016. Mr. Chang told The Guardian that year that playing Tetris serially mimicked the drudgery of the modern office, where 'we're expected to repeat a specific task over and over.' He added, 'It's the way capitalism makes us work, where you have to achieve more than others.' His high score of 614,094 earned him second place in world rankings for a while. Mr. Chang's last major project, 'Cents,' examined the nature of value and was anchored in both the analog and digital worlds. Around 2017, he began to casually set aside pennies from the change he received, he told The Creative Independent, with no particular goal. He knew, he said, that some hoarders were exchanging cash for rolls of pennies at banks and then sorting out the more valuable ones from the ones made before 1982, when they were 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc, making each one worth up to 3.1 cents. But, he said, a hoarder couldn't achieve much value without large quantities of the older copper. 'I've been thinking about what I could do with melting them down,' he said, 'even though it's illegal' because pennies are currency. 'The penny is this thing that we all have in our pockets. It's the lowest common denominator, it's like junk, it's like nothing.' He ultimately figured out what he would do. He collected 10,000 pennies from 1982 and earlier; documented and inscribed them on the blockchain, a digital database, and melted them down into a 68-pound cube. A three-dimensional model of the cube was auctioned by Christie's last year as a bitcoin ordinal, a digital asset, for $50,400 — Mr. Chang retained the physical cube — while the digital inscriptions on the pennies are owned by thousands of individuals and are sold on the open market. In addition to his sister Danielle and his parents, Mr. Chang is survived by another sister, Madeline Chang, and his partner, Tsubasa Narita. Aki Sasamoto, an artist and a professor at the Yale School of Art, had watched Mr. Chang build his body of work since they were housemates at Wesleyan. She said that he brought personality to conceptual art, a field often devoid of one, and that he was a sharp observer of cultural phenomena and new media. While his work might look obsessive, Ms. Sasamoto said, 'I find it is more like a thoroughness, in line with personal ritual and devotion. I relate it to someone who meditates every day. There was something spiritual about him.'
