“A journalist is in the forest.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, spoke from the controls of a video installation powered by artificial intelligence at the Onassis Foundation ONX Studioa high-tech media lab in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. I was talking to the computer running this installation. About me.
“A huge fleet of food delivery bikes appears,” Da Costa continued, telling a nonsensical story that the ai would soon display 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 bicycles appeared on the three enormous video screens surrounding us, the entire scene rendered in a charmingly nostalgic style that evoked 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 demonstrating “The Golden Key,” one of four digital video installations on display in a black box theater in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Building. Collectively known as Techniquesvenues close out the latest edition of BAM's Next Wave Festival with the kind of innovative offerings the organization thought it needed after scaling back its programming and laying off 13 percent of its staff in 2023.
Techne, which runs until January 19, is a festival within a festival. It is curated and funded 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 for free.
The series kicked off 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,” which takes its name from a story by the Brothers Grimm, a short story that invited readers to come up with their own ending more than 200 years ago. will be followed by “Voices” a foray into the spiritual world of Margarita Athanasioua video artist based in Athens, and “Secret Garden” a collection of stories of black women's achievements brought together by Stephanie Dinkins, a Brooklyn artist. With the exception of “Voices,” each is interactive, either by sensing the audience response or, in the case of “The Golden Key,” by receiving information directly through computer kiosks on the floor of the theater space. .
The best use ai to criticize technology: “a machine that is 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 silent panoply of sounds and images that signify humanity's divorce from nature. But unlike the original film, the ai version contains no real photographs or music by Philip Glass; It is generated by software that was trained with the Reggio film and the Glass score.
Fitzgerald first saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001, when he was studying anthropology at Brown University. He quickly went on to study film and before long he was projecting “Koyaanisqatsi” on the ceiling of his room at home. “My intention was to get into the experience,” he said as we sat in ONX. “It was one of the first times I thought about immersive storytelling.”
Then, a couple of years ago, he met Reggio, who at the time was 80 years old 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 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 U.S. branch of the Onassis Foundation, she was the person ONX turned to when looking for a large public venue to display the work created in their lab.
“Most of the time you've seen this kind of 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 take it squarely 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 drop in attendance and fundraising that resulted from it. It has also undergone turnover at the top: its president, Gina Duncan, took over in 2022, and its artistic director, Amy Cassello, assumed her current role just six months ago after serving in the role on an interim basis when her predecessor, the theater. Producer David Binder left after four years on the job.
With 11 events this season, Next Wave appears to be recovering from its low point in 2023, when only eight plays were presented, but it is still well below the 31 that were performed in 2017. “We try not to count,” Cassello jokes. when we met at a cafe in Brooklyn.
Before leaving, 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,” he said of “The Golden Key,” “but I appreciate that you can participate and the variety of results is quite surprising.” And your opinion on ai 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 stories. 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 For their ai, 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. “Mythology is our common basis for making sense of the world,” Da Costa said as his system surrounded us with seductive but empty fabrications. But what if someone established autonomous ai systems that worked on an industrial scale to fabricate meaningless or, worse, false stories?
Much has been written about the havoc that social media has wreaked, 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 a very important time to engage and try to make yourself 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 to 11); “Voices” (January 12 and 14 and 15); “Secret Garden” (January 16-19).
January 7 at 7:30 p.m.: Special screening of “Koyaanisqatsi” at BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, followed by a Q&A session with John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio.
