“A reporter is in the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, was speaking from the controls of an artificial intelligence-based video installation at the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio, a high-tech multimedia lab in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. It was talking to the computer running this installation. About me.
“A huge fleet of food delivery bikes shows up,” Da Costa continued, spinning a silly story that the AI would soon render on screen. “The heavens open and a galactic, friendly being descends with a scepter. Frank and the galactic being meet the deliverymen and share a meal under the forest canopy. …”
Moments later, a fleet of food delivery bikes did appear on the three huge video screens that surrounded us, the whole scene rendered in a charmingly nostalgic style that suggests 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 tale was told in soft tones by an apparently Oxbridge-educated fembot.
Da Costa was presenting “The Golden Key,” one of four digital video installations displayed in a black box theater in the Fisher Building of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Collectively known as Techne, the installations close out the latest edition of BAM’s Next Wave Festival with the kind of innovative offerings the organization felt it needed after scaling back its programming and laying off 13% of its 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 from the Onassis Foundation, which built the studio and makes the multimillion-dollar facility available to dozens of artists for free.
The series opened Saturday with “The Vivid Unknown,” an AI-powered remake by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio of Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi.” Next is “The Golden Key,” which takes its name from a story by the Brothers Grimm, a short story that invited readers to invent 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 black women’s achievement stories compiled by Brooklyn-based artist Stephanie Dinkins. With the exception of “Voices,” each is interactive, either by sensing audience response or, in the case of “The Golden Key,” receiving information directly through computer kiosks on the theater floor.
The best of these use artificial intelligence to critique technology — “a machine out of control,” as Fitzgerald called it. Like “Koyaanisqatsi” — the title of which is a Hopi word that roughly translates to “life out of balance” — “The Vivid Unknown” is a mostly unmistakable armory of sound and imagery that marks humanity’s divorce from nature. But unlike the original film, the AI version does not contain actual photography and music by Philip Glass. generated by software trained on Reggio’s film and Glass’s score.
Fitzgerald first saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001 when he was an anthropologist 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 inside the experience,” he said as we sat in the ONX. “It was one of the first times I thought about immersive storytelling.”
Then, a few years ago, she met Reggio, who was then in his 80s and living in Santa Fe, New York, 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 the other installations at Techne came to BAM through the organization’s former president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, who retired in 2015. Now a board member of the US chapter of the Onassis Foundation, she was the person in turned to ONX when looking for a large, public space to display the work created in his workshop.
“Most of the time you’ve seen this immersive stuff in big shows,” Hopkins said in a phone interview, recalling light shows that aim to immerse you in works by 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 came out 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 participation and fundraising. It has also suffered a shakeup at the top: Its president, Gina Duncan, took over in 2022, and its artistic director, Amy Casello, took up her current position just six months ago after taking over temporarily when her predecessor, theater producer David Binder, left after four years on the job.
With 11 events this season, Next Wave appears to be recovering from its nadir in 2023, when only eight works were presented, but that’s still well below the 31 that went up in 2017. “We’re trying not to count,” he joked. Cassello when we met in a Brooklyn coffee shop.
Before he left, Binder made digital media a priority for BAM. Although Cassello followed suit, she looks an unlikely champion. “I still don’t understand how it works,” he said of “The Golden Key,” “but I appreciate that you were able to participate, and the variety of results is pretty amazing.” And her views on artificial intelligence in general? “I would put myself in the resilient category, but I trust people who are smarter than me.”
At first glance, “The Golden Key” is a digital game that you can interact with to create wild yarns. 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, false folk tales.
After feeding a massive index of folklore into their AI, Da Costa and his co-creator, Matthew Niederhauser, programmed it to simulate the kind of stories that, for centuries and across vastly different cultures, have told us who we are and where we come from. from. “Mythology is our common basis for understanding the world,” Da Costa said as his system surrounded us with deceptive but empty constructs. But what if someone created autonomous artificial intelligence systems operating on an industrial scale to construct stories that make no sense or, worse, false?
Much has been written about the havoc social media has wreaked, in part because the primary goal of social media companies is to maximize engagement and thus profits. “It doesn’t take much to think about who will be in control of these tools,” Da Costa said. “What will be the economic interests behind this and the political interests?”
Niederhauser, who was listening via video call, added: “This is not the time for artists to retire from technology. It’s a hugely important time to engage and try to get you to think critically about how it works.”
Techne (BAM presentation, Onassis and under the radar)
Through January 19 at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn. bam.org/new-media/2024/techne. “The Vivid Unknown” (Jan. 4–5 and 7). “The Golden Key” (Jan. 8–11). “Voices” (January 12 and 14–15). “Secret Garden” (January 16–19).
January 7 at 7:30pm: Special screening of “Koyaanisqatsi” at BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, followed by Q. and A. John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio.
