REVIEW: Paradox Paul - Ventnor Fringe 26.7.25

What is Artificial Intelligence? Is it a good thing? Or bad?

It might depend on which sci-fi novel you last read or which YouTube clips have dropped on your thread of late. Or which TV series you're midway through bingeing. Maybe you use it to cheat on your homework. Maybe your news input is governed by it. 

That uninvited line of text under your social media post offering further knowledge - is that a click-through portal to a genuine information resource? Or a convincing paragraph or two of shameless, unmitigated fiction?

Paradox Paul regularly spends 10 weeks at a time battling the stroppy forces of AI to produce tiny clips of super-realism. But no matter how carefully knitted together these post-technicolor movie scenes are, the silicon superbrain that co-produced them still glitches when prompted to spell simple words like "Piccadilly". That's a paradox, right there. And something of a reassurance for now.

Paul's finished products are a USB stick of music videos and short films, veering from imaginative and fantastical illustrations of Paul Armfield's most recent singles to dystopian scenes of street scavenging, aid drops of air tanks, and grubby kids cowering behind barricades of broken washing machines while marauding packs of bad cops hunt them. His disturbed Brave New World is one of Victorian industry and smokestacks - or of social climbers dripping fake cardboard box finery while a relentless overlay of graphics push them to consume more.

Nearly forgot the most important bit. The scene.

We're watching these powerful clips in the graveyard of St Catherine's Church, at night, on a pop up video screen bussed in from Cowes. We're surrounded, silently, by a couple hundred sleeping people whose entire lives were lived out in full one or two centuries ago - long before motor cars, projectors, electric guitars, phones (mobile and landline) and factories.

What must they think? They're maybe glad of the rare company. Perhaps they're miffed at being tiptoed around? The paradox-overload of these resting souls meeting the living to explore a vision of the future as one mass, is a biggie. Above, the clouds part a little to display the cross-shaped constellation of Cygnus to us living, dead and artificial souls - the stars as close to a constant as we can ever hope to rely on.

Andy Biotic

(Thanks to Paradox Paul for the new nom-de-plume. It's a keeper)