“A journalist is in the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, spoke from the controls of an artificial intelligence-powered video installation at the Onassis Foundation's ONX Studio, a high-tech media lab in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. He was speaking to the computer running this installation. About me.
“A huge fleet of food delivery bikes appears,” Da Costa continued, telling a nonsense story that the AI would soon display on the screen. “The heavens open and a galactic, friendly being comes down with a scepter. Frank and the galactic creature meet the delivery people and share a meal under the canopy. …”
Moments later, a fleet of food delivery bicycles did indeed appear on the three enormous video screens surrounding us, the whole scene depicted in a charmingly nostalgic style reminiscent of travel posters from a century ago. On the handlebars of each bicycle was a wicker basket full of bounties. The forest, although completely computer generated, looked green and inviting. The story was told in a low voice by an apparently Oxbridge-trained fembot.
Da Costa demonstrated “The Golden Key,” one of four digital video installations on view in a black box theater in the Fisher Building of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The installations, collectively known as Techne, close the latest edition of BAM's Next Wave Festival with the kind of innovative offering the organization thought it needed after scaling back programming and laying off 13 percent of its workforce by 2023.
Techne, which runs until January 19, is a festival within a festival. It is curated and primarily funded by Onassis ONX, a digital culture initiative of the Onassis Foundation, which built the studio and makes its multimillion-dollar facilities available for free to dozens of artists.
The series kicked off Saturday with “The Vivid Unknown,” an AI-driven remake by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio of Reggio's 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi.” Next up is “The Golden Key,” which takes its name from a story by the brothers Grimm, a short story that invited readers to create their own ending more than 200 years ago. It will be followed by “Voices,” a foray into the spirit world by Margarita Athanasiou, a video artist based in Athens, and “Secret Garden,” a collection of performance stories by black women curated by Stephanie Dinkins, a Brooklyn-based artist. With the exception of 'Voices', all are interactive, either by sensing the audience's response or, in the case of 'The Golden Key', by receiving input directly from computer kiosks on the floor of the theater space.
The best of these use AI to critique technology – “a machine spiraling out of control,” as Fitzgerald put it. Like “Koyaanisqatsi” — whose title is a Hopi word that roughly translates to “life out of balance” — “The Vivid Unknown” is a largely wordless panoply of sounds and images that symbolize humanity's separation from nature. But unlike the original film, the AI version features no real photography and no music by Philip Glass; it is generated by software trained on Reggio's film and Glass's score.
Fitzgerald first saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001, while studying anthropology at Brown University. He quickly switched to film studies and soon projected 'Koyaanisqatsi' on the ceiling of his room at home. “My intention was to get into the experience,” he said as we sat at ONX. “It was one of the first times I thought about compelling storytelling.”
Then, a few years ago, he was introduced to Reggio, who was by then in his 80s and living in Santa Fe, NM, but no longer traveling. “Who goes to Santa Fe to have coffee with someone?” said Fitzgerald. “But I did it on a whim.”
“The Vivid Unknown” and the other installations at Techne came to BAM through the organization's former president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, who retired in 2015. She is now a board member of the US chapter of the Onassis Foundation and was the person ONX turned to when it was looking for a large, public venue to exhibit the work created in its laboratory.
“Most of the time you've seen this immersive material in big glasses,” Hopkins said in a telephone interview, recalling light shows intended to immerse you in works by the likes of Van Gogh. “What we're trying to do here is bring it fully into the performing arts,” where, among other things, it could play an important role in attracting today's equivalent of the black-clad hipsters who ventured to Brooklyn in search of the new and experimental 40 years ago.
Like many arts organizations, BAM is still recovering from the pandemic and the resulting drop in attendance and fundraising. It has also suffered from turnover at the top: its president, Gina Duncan, took over in 2022, and its artistic director, Amy Cassello, took over her current role just six months ago after filling in on an interim basis when her predecessor, the theater producer David Binder, left after four years on the job.
With eleven events this season, Next Wave appears to be recovering from its low point in 2023, when only eight works were presented, but that is still far below the 31 performed in 2017. “We try not to count,” Cassello joked. when we met in a cafe in Brooklyn.
Before he left, Binder made digital media a priority for BAM. Although Cassello has followed suit, she seems an unlikely champion. “I still don't understand how it works,” she said of “The Golden Key,” “but I appreciate you being able to participate, and the variety of outcomes is pretty amazing.” And her view on AI in general? “I would put myself in the resistant category, but I trust people smarter than me.”
At first glance, “The Golden Key” is a digital toy that you can interact with to generate wild yarns. But on a deeper level, it offers, as Da Costa put it during the preview in the Olympic Tower, “an encounter with a future in which machines tell us stories” – in this case, fake folktales.
After adding a massive index of folklore to their AI, Da Costa and his co-creator, Matthew Niederhauser, programmed it to simulate the kinds of stories that have told us who we are and where we come from across centuries and across civilizations far apart. . by. “Mythology is our common basis for understanding the world,” said Da Costa, as his system surrounded us with tempting but empty fictions. But what if someone were to create autonomous AI systems that operated on an industrial scale to spin stories that were meaningless or, worse, false?
Much has been written about the devastation social media has wrought, in part because the main goal of social media companies is to maximize engagement and therefore profits. “It doesn't take much to think about who is going to have control over these tools,” Da Costa said. “What will be the economic interests behind that, and the political interests?”
Niederhauser, who listened via video call, added: “This is not the time for artists to retreat from technology. It is a super important moment to involve you and make you think critically about how it works.”
Techne (presented by BAM, Onassis And Under the radar)
Through January 19 at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn; bam.org/new-media/2024/techne. “The Vivid Unknown” (January 4-5 and 7); “The Golden Key” (January 8–11); 'Voices' (January 12 and 14–15); “Secret Garden” (January 16–19).
January 7 at 7:30 PM: Special screening of “Koyaanisqatsi” at BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, followed by a Q&A with John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio.
