Curtain Road in Shoreditch will soon be the site of a new Museum of Shakespeare, a visitor experience transporting guests back to the 1590s when The Lord Chamberlain’s Men staged the likes of Romeo and Juliet and Henry V.
But before that, Finchley-raised Creative Director Matthew Maxwell will be staging Something Rich and Strange – an AI-based installation inspired by Shakespeare’s words, on what would have been his birthday.
Orlando and Rosalind by Matthew Maxwell. (Image: Matthew Maxwell) He explains the project:
Q: When and where can we see your artwork?
A: The installation opens at 55 Curtain Road on April 23rd and runs until the end of the week. It’s an immersive environment that sits somewhere between theatre, video installation and algorithmic dreamscape.
Q: What were your inspirations?
A: The project introduces the imaging power of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GENAI) to the words of William Shakespeare. Text, themes, and lyrics written or performed in the years 1597-99 – when the poet was living and working in the London district of Shoreditch- are used as prompts in a Creative Cybernetic process to create video, sound and imagery.
Q: How did AI help to create the artwork?
A: AI was less a tool and more a collaborator. I used large language models and image generators to generate script fragments, visuals and spatial motifs. Unlike traditional techniques, this introduces unpredictability. It’s a dialogue between me and the machine, often producing results that surprise even me. You’re not ‘programming’ an artwork, you’re cultivating one.
A: It’s immersive in the sense that it surrounds and implicates the viewer. Rather than watching from the outside, you’re inside a shifting landscape of sound, image and text. It asks you to look deeper into the peculiar magic that certain places have. Shoreditch being one of them.
Q: What is your background and how did you come to make the work?
A: I’m a London-based artist and researcher working at the intersection of creative AI, performance and media theory. This piece evolved out of my PhD at Middlesex University, where I’ve been exploring what it means to create with machines, not just use them as tools. Not asking “can AI be creative?” but “what does it mean to create with nonhuman intelligence?”
Q: What do you hope viewers will get from it?
A: A shift in perspective. A soft disturbance. An encounter with the strangeness of cognition – human and machine – as something entangled, not opposed. Ideally, it lingers like a dream you half-remember.
Something Rich and Strange by Matthew Maxwell runs at 55, Curtain Road Shoreditch from April 23-27.
