In 2016, a man sits opposite a machine, surrounded by cameras and press. They are playing the oldest board game in the world: Go.

He is the world champion: Lee Sedol.
The machine is a deep neural network: AlphaGo.

Go is more complex than the imagination can grasp, with more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. It is not a game of brute calculation, but of intuition and creativity. No one expects the machine to win.

Yet it does.

AlphaGo’s 37th move proves decisive and hits like a bomb. The computer plays a move no human had considered for thousands of years. Sedol turns pale, the commentators fall silent, and the image seems to freeze. In this suspended moment of defeat and awe, the radical strangeness of A.I. stares us in the face: highly intelligent, intuitive even, yet entirely alien.

Move 37 is a lecture performance about phenomena that exceed our imagination. Together with cosmologist Thomas Hertog, Ryckewaert explores what is both weird and real — from creative A.I. to black holes that tear apart spacetime – in an atmosphere of cold, Lovecraftian horror.

‘Not just your average lecture performance, but more like a David Lynch – in which inexplicable things create a permanent friction between the normal and the radically weird. Fascinating.’ – Etcetera