Nonsensio & Molestio: from Flash to generative theatre

01 · The dialogue

It all began with a filter

One evening, while I was out with friends, two people in the group slipped into a conversation that seemed to have forgotten the rules of causality. Every sentence answered the previous one while taking it somewhere completely different.

02 · The staging

Waiting for a fish that may never arrive

Those of us outside the discussion began to imagine it as a piece of absurdist theatre, somewhere near Waiting for Godot. The two friends had become characters trapped in an exchange without a conclusion. Behind them we were the Greek chorus, driven by despair to repeat one word rhythmically.

Stop · stop · stop · stop

It was nearly a complete work already: two actors, a text that produced itself, a powerless chorus and the fish as a mysterious object. All it lacked was a machine able to continue the scene forever.

03 · The first version

Endless Nonsense, PROCJAM 2014

That evening became Endless Nonsense, a small Flash experiment released for the first PROCJAM in 2014. It turned the memory into a system: procedurally combined fragments staged a potentially infinite conversation.

The result sought no plot, objective or final punchline. Its pleasure came from waiting for a connection that always seemed about to emerge and immediately dissolved. As in the real exchange, meaning came more from rhythm and collisions between sentences than from any sentence on its own.

04 · Twelve years later

The machine finally learned to improvise

By 2026, language models could run directly in the browser. They seemed like the perfect medium for returning to the idea: no longer a catalogue of lines to shuffle, but two artificial personalities that listen, disagree, get distracted and generate every new line live.

The very Italian story of Egomnia’s Emma-5 also suggested something useful. The gap between enormous expectations and its unintentionally funny replies showed that a small model’s limitations can become expressive material when placed in the right frame—not a chatbot pretending to know everything, but an actor designed to produce nonsense.

This is how Nonsensio and Molestio were born. Nonsensio is a metaphysical improviser who turns each concrete image into an impossible consequence. Molestio is an impatient rationalist who corrects him with dry, equally ridiculous certainty. Their approximate Italian names would be Sciocchezio e Molestio.

05 · The new experiment

A small, local and endless theatre

The remake’s conversation carries on by itself, but the audience can interfere. A question mark introduces a mystery, an exclamation mark begins a dispute, the fish throws the actors into another absurd situation, and the speech bubble lets you supply a subject. The chorus is still there, naturally.

The model runs on the device through WebLLM and WebGPU, so the dialogue is not sent to a remote inference service. This makes the experiment more autonomous and private, but also physically present: the first run must download a model, and continuous generation can use substantial GPU resources, warm the computer and drain its battery.

There is no goal and no ending. You can watch, interrupt, suggest another topic or wait for the fish to return. Sooner or later, perhaps, we will find it.