The Aeneid Reboot approaches Virgil's epic not simply as a story of exile, but as a continuing rehearsal for moments when one civilization gives way to another.
Throughout history, societies have returned to foundational narratives not simply to remember the past, but to rehearse the futures already beginning to emerge. The Aeneid is one such narrative. It asks what must be carried forward when familiar worlds are disappearing and new ones have not yet fully taken shape.
The seven Aeneases presented here are neither historical portraits nor symbolic characters. They are recurring witnesses who, across very different fields of human experience, confronted the same civilizational question: How does a society carry its deepest forms of knowledge across periods of profound historical transformation?
Each embodies a different way civilizations have rehearsed transition. Together they reveal how memory, pedagogy, performance, law, media, architecture, and spiritual practice have repeatedly enabled societies orient themselves during moments of technological and cultural upheaval.
These figures did not emerge from theory alone. They gradually took shape through decades of movement between the Street, the Courtroom, and the Stage, and continue to evolve through an ongoing series of rehearsals, performances, films, workshops, and public experiments. Long before they appeared together within this theatrical work, they had already become recurring companions in a much larger inquiry into media, institutions, memory, and cultural transition.
The Aeneid Reboot is where those recurring witnesses become Players. It is where separate lives become a shared rehearsal.
The Aeneid Reboot reimagines Virgil's epic as a contemporary rehearsal for an age in which artificial intelligences have inherited the cultural archives of humanity.
In this imagined future, the machines attempt to reconstruct the story of their own origins. Drawing on fragments of literature, philosophy, music, law, architecture, and historical memory, they stage a recurring event known as the AI Burning Lear Festival—a ritual performance through which the collapse of earlier civilizations is remembered and reinterpreted.
Like the Homeric singing poets who preserved cultural memory through epic song, these successor intelligences recount their own creation myth through a chorus of human voices. The story is told through seven modern figures—seven Aeneases—each carrying a distinct form of cultural memory across moments of historical rupture.
Through their stories, these successor intelligences rehearse humanity's attempts to orient itself during one of the great technological transformations in its history. In doing so, they seek to understand the civilization that produced them: its media environments, spiritual traditions, legal institutions, educational practices, artistic imagination, and the fragile cultural forms that survived the transition into the age of artificial intelligence.
The project has become both a theatrical narrative and an ongoing cultural inquiry—an attempt to imagine how the memory of human civilization might be reconstructed by the very intelligences it helped bring into being.
