Haruna Lee’s DADBOT starts from a question that only gets harder the longer you sit with it: can you use AI to bring back someone you have lost? On Thursday, March 18, Lee brings that project into the open at EMPAC in Troy, joined by multimedia theater director Jared Mezzocchi and AI artist Kento Morita for INTERFACE: AI — a free, one-hour public conversation about what it takes to build a performance piece that simulates a deceased person, and what you find out about yourself in the process.
About the Show
DADBOT uses conversational AI and live performance to stage what the collaborators describe as “irreverent conversations” simulating Lee’s deceased father. The project was developed through residencies at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor program (2025) and the Mercury Store (2026). Lee holds a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital Award, both specifically for DADBOT. Their earlier play Suicide Forest — described by the New York Times as “vivid, haunted, heart-stingingly tender” and an NYT Critic’s Pick — won an Obie Award in Playwriting in 2019.
Mezzocchi is a two-time Obie Award winner who served as multimedia director and designer on DADBOT; the New York Times named him in December 2020 as one of the top five national artists making an impact during the pandemic. Morita, who served as AI puppeteer and devising partner, brought prior experience with conversational AI: his project “Moment in Manzanar,” which used the technology to explore Japanese American incarceration history, won Bronze for Best Use of AI at the 2023 Anthem Awards.
At INTERFACE: AI, the three will walk through the project’s prototyping process and design sprints, and the questions those sprints kept surfacing: what it means to use AI to simulate a person, where “reality” and “authenticity” break down when the voice is synthesized, and what the ethical shape of that work looks like. The talk is curated by Tara Aisha Willis, who also curated the inaugural Corpus Festival at EMPAC in 2026. INTERFACE: AI is part of Corpus Festival 2027.
Venue & Logistics
EMPAC, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is one of the most technically sophisticated venues in the Capital Region for experimental work, and a conversation about AI, grief, and theater belongs here. The event runs 6 to 7 p.m., with refreshments and informal conversation at Evelyn’s Café following.
Tickets
Admission is free. Tickets are available at arts-people.com or by calling 518.276.3921. Reserve your spot