Truthmachine - Counterpilot on truth, technology and Truthmachine at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Award-winning Australian company Counterpilot bring Truthmachine to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, inviting audiences into a theatrical social experiment where twelve strangers are placed in a room and one volunteer undergoes a working lie detector test while the remaining eleven become the jury. Connected to a custom-built polygraph system, the volunteer faces a live interrogation as biometric sensors measure heart rate, breathing and skin response in real time, transforming the body's reactions into a live symphony of light and sound. As the jury watches, votes and decides, the production asks a timely question: in a world of fake news and alternative facts, can your heart rate lie as effectively as our leaders can? We caught up with the team to find out more.

Truthmachine is described as part theatre, part social experiment. Tell us about that distinction.

We like to say that theatre doesn’t happen on stages, it happens in the spaces between people. We think that’s true of old school dramatic theatre, where the energetic transfer between humans in a room defines its liveness, but for us we’re looking for strange new ways to create acts of theatre that happen between people. It’s an experiment because we genuinely don’t know what exactly will happen each time we perform the work, and it’s a social experiment because it absolutely depends on interpersonal exchange – it would be nowhere near as exciting if you saw it without anyone else in the room with you!

The production explores our enduring fascination with lie detectors, despite ongoing debate about their reliability. Why do you think the idea of a machine that can reveal the truth still captures the public imagination?

In our post-truth age, constantly surrounded by fake news, alternative facts, and sliding scales of outlandish conspiracy there’s something almost fantastical about the notion that something can be verified as definitely true. There are many questions - both on a global scale and a personal scale - that we know can never be answered, so the idea of a machine scientifically able to excavate the truth is a kind of magic. Of course, polygraphs are not as altogether scientific as cartoons may lead us to believe – but it’s this distant cursory awareness that most of us have of them (vaguely aware they exist but not quite sure if they’re kind of bullshit) that originally had us obsessed with lie detectors. Even the machine appears unknowable somehow.

The production transforms heart rate, breathing and other biometric responses into light and sound. How did that creative decision emerge during development?

Data can be really exciting because of what it means, but it’s hard to convince people that subtle adjustments in numerical values can be thrilling. The technical design for Truthmachine was about trying to translate very subtle live variances in data in a way that felt immediate, theatrical and thrilling. Throughout the show, you’re listening to fluctuations in data caused by a real person’s body through a shifting soundscape. When their heart beats faster, a light flashes in time with their pulse. It’s strangely intimate! And it means the lights and sounds are more than just an aesthetic layer - they represent something real that’s happening in the room that we would never otherwise be able to notice. 

So, private physiological responses are transformed into a shared theatrical experience. Why did you decide to make something so deeply personal into something witnessed collectively?

We were trying to figure out why people were so intimidated by lie detectors. We were asking people all around us – would you take a lie detector test? And so many recoil with horror. Usually, it’s not because they’re hiding a specific secret, but because they’re somehow frightened of truth more broadly. What if the machine could find something in them they didn’t even know they were hiding? It seems that the stakes of the experiment are the risk of social shame. In a post-truth era, we’re curious about whether ‘the truth’ actually has that power anymore - but in the meantime, audiences being intimidated by the threat of social shame gives the whole experience a high-adrenaline quality!

The show suggests that people continue to search for certainty, even when certainty may not exist. Why do you think we're so uncomfortable with ambiguity?

Maybe it’s easier to act on a black & white fact – when we think we understand something, we know what to do about it, how to relate to it, where to position ourselves in relation to it. But the world is full of shadowy grey zones and we’re constantly having to navigate the in-between. Maybe there’s risk in ambiguity? But I kind of think uncertainty can be sexy, can’t it? The not-knowingness of life is all a part of the thrill!

Technology sits at the centre of Truthmachine, yet the show ultimately depends on very human decisions about trust, judgement and vulnerability. Is that tension something you want audiences to wrestle with?

There’s an idea that people are the real ‘lie detectors’ and the polygraph is just a tool they use. In formal polygraph examinations, the machine doesn’t make a TRUE/FALSE decision, it just presents data to be interpreted by someone with training! In a similar spirit, our theatre projects only use technology as a means to an end - to activate the humans in the room. We think audiences respond authentically in the face of technology because we’re used to being genuinely ourselves when we engage with machines, even when they seem to work against us. In Truthmachine, it can feel like it’s the audience versus the machine. But that still means the hero of the story is you.

Truthmachine will be performed at various times, up to eight times a day, at C Venues C Alto from 7^th – 30^th August.

Booking link: https://res.cthearts.com/event/34:5337/