“A journalist finds himself in the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, spoke from the controls of an AI-driven video installation at the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio, a high-tech multimedia laboratory in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. He was talking to the computer running this installation. About me.
“A huge fleet of food delivery bicycles appears,” Da Costa continued, telling a nonsensical story that AI would soon render on screen. “The heavens open and a friendly, galactic being descends with a scepter. Frank and the galactic being meet the delivery men and share a meal under the forest canopy. …”
Moments later, a fleet of food delivery bikes actually appeared on the three enormous screens surrounding us, the entire scene rendered in a charming, nostalgic style reminiscent of travel posters from a century ago. Attached to the handlebars of each bicycle was a wicker basket overflowing with bounty. The forest, although entirely computer generated, looked green and inviting. The story was narrated in dulcet tones by an apparently Oxbridge-educated fembot.
Da Costa was presenting “The Golden Key,” one of four digital video installations on display in a black box theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Building. Known collectively as Techne, the installations are closing out the latest edition of BAM’s Next Wave Festival with the kind of innovative offerings the organization felt it needed after reducing programming and laying off 13% of staff in 2023.
Techne, which runs until January 19, is a festival within a festival. It is curated and funded primarily by Onassis ONX, a digital culture initiative of the Onassis Foundation, which built the studio and makes its multimillion-dollar facilities available to dozens of artists free of charge.
The series opened Saturday with “The Vivid Unknown,” John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio’s AI-powered reimagining of Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi.” Next up is “The Golden Key,” named after a story by the Brothers Grimm, a short story that invited readers to devise their own ending more than 200 years ago. It will be followed by “Voices,” a foray into the spirit world by Margarita Athanasiou, an Athens-based video artist, and “Secret Garden,” a collection of success stories of black women assembled by Stephanie Dinkins, a Brooklyn artist. With the exception of “Voices,” each is interactive, sensing the audience’s response or, in the case of “The Golden Key,” receiving input directly through computer kiosks on the floor of the theater space.
The best of these use AI to critique technology – “a machine out of control,” as Fitzgerald called it. Like “Koyaanisqatsi” — whose title is a Hopi word that roughly translates to “life out of balance” — “The Vivid Unknown” is a mostly wordless panoply of sounds and images that signify humanity’s divorce from nature. But unlike the original film, the AI version contains no real photography or music by Philip Glass; it is generated by software trained on Reggio’s film and Glass’ soundtrack.
Fitzgerald first saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001, when he was studying anthropology at Brown University. He quickly moved on 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 engaging storytelling.”
Then, a couple of years ago, he met Reggio, who by then was in his 80s and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but no longer traveling. “Who goes to Santa Fe to have coffee with someone?” Fitzgerald said. “But I did it on a whim.”
“The Vivid Unknown” and Techne’s other installations came to BAM via the organization’s former president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, who retired in 2015. Now a board member of the American branch of the Onassis Foundation, she was the person to which ONX turned to when it was looking for a large and public place to exhibit the work created in its laboratory.
“Most of the time you’ve seen these immersive-type things in big shows,” Hopkins said in a phone interview, recalling light shows that purport to immerse you in the works of Van Gogh, for example. “What we’re trying to do here is bring it fully into the performing arts,” where it could, among other things, be instrumental 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 decline 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, assumed her current position only six months ago, after temporarily replacing her predecessor, the theater producer David Binder, left after four years of work.
With 11 events this season, Next Wave appears to be rebounding from its low point in 2023, when just eight plays were presented, but is still far short of the 31 staged in 2017. ‘Let’s not count’ , joked Cassello. when we met in a bar in Brooklyn.
Before leaving, Binder made digital media a priority for BAM. Although Cassello has followed her lead, she seems an unlikely champion. “I still don’t understand how it works,” he said of “The Golden Key,” “but I appreciate that you can participate and the variety of results is pretty amazing.” And your views on artificial intelligence in general? “I would put myself in the resistant category, but I trust people who are smarter than me.”
At first glance, “The Golden Key” is a digital toy that you can interact with to generate wild yarn. But on a deeper level it offers, as Da Costa said during the preview at the Olympic Tower, “an encounter with a future in which machines tell us stories” – in this case, fictional folk tales.
After giving their AI a massive index of folklore, Da Costa and his co-creator, Matthew Niederhauser, programmed it to simulate the kinds of stories that, for centuries and across widely separated civilizations, have told us who we are and where we come from. from. “Mythology is our common basis for making sense of the world,” Da Costa said as his system surrounded us with seductive but empty inventions. But what if someone created autonomous AI systems that operated on an industrial scale to fabricate meaningless or, worse, false stories?
Much has been written about the chaos caused by social media, in part because the primary goal of social media companies is to maximize engagement and therefore profits. “It doesn’t take much to think about who will have control of these tools,” Da Costa said. “What will be the economic interests behind this and the political interests?”
Niederhauser, who had been listening via video call, added: “This is not the time for artists to retreat from technology. It’s an extremely important time to engage and try to get yourself to think critically about how this 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” (8-11 January); “Voices” (12 and 14-15 January); “Secret Garden” (16-19 January).
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.