Susan Lim is a surgeon, scientist, playwright, lyricist, and creative director of a project centred on a future companionship between human and inanimate, enabled through the new sciences and technologies, to address the global challenge of loneliness and the need for new approaches to companionship in a future world.
In 2004, Susan embarked on surgical training with a robot Zeus in Santa Barbara. The objective was that the partnership of man and machine would perform a surgical task better than either could do alone. She continued her career path in robotics, and subsequently, when Zeus ‘died’, she partnered dA Vinci, a state-of-the-art, surgical robot, working many hours alone with the robot, to perform complex surgeries.
In 2017, Susan was invited to speak at an INK conference in Hyderabad in a session ‘Giant leaps: thrilling potential of AI and Robotics’.
She partnered with a hologram of a plush Inanimate toy, ALAN, and spoke on ‘the Future of Companionship’ .
The audience response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive, and this inspired Susan to further develop the theme through a musical storyboard, together with co-creator Christina Teenz Tan, and a team of composers and animators, grouped together as the ALAN team.
Her path to storytelling started with words to form lyrics, composed into songs, which inspired orchestral tracks, then arranged into six ACTs to form a 32 min cross genre ‘Lim Fantasy of Companionship for Piano and Orchestra’. This was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra , London Voices, pianist Tedd Joselson, and an electric guitarist, bass player, drums and solo voice,
120 musicians to be exact, at Abbey Rd Studios in Nov 2019. It was released on Signum Records in April 2021, had a World Premiere at the Esplanade Concert Hall Singapore in June 2022, , and was recently presented by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a UK Premiere, at the Cadogan Hall, London in July 2023.
The musical storyboard of the Lim Fantasy has inspired a series of animation short films under the direction of animation artist Samudra Kajal Saikia. This has won more than 800 awards in film festivals globally, including wins in 10 categories at the Cannes World Film Festival 2021, for best original story, best soundtrack and best animation, and best Score at the British Short Film Awards 2021, best animation at the Chicago filmmaker awards Dec 2022, and Best in Show, Diamond award, best animation, SoCal film Awards season 16, 2022, and best Musical Film at the Oniros Film Awards New York, Jan 2023, among others.
Susan’s next project is a sequel, a ‘Cosmic Rhapsody’, which sees the partnership of human and inanimate head up to space, to find solutions to earth’s environmental crisis, that may save the human race. The soundtrack has been recorded at Abbey Rd Studios with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler, the London Voices and ALAN team of musicians, and the animation film is underway.