EGN NEWS DESK
“A journalist finds himself within the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, was talking from the controls of a synthetic intelligence-driven video set up on the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio, a high-tech media lab within the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. He was speaking to the pc that runs this set up. About me.
“An enormous fleet of meals supply bicycles seems,” Da Costa continued, spinning a nonsense story the A.I. would quickly render onscreen. “The heavens open and a galactic, pleasant being comes down with a scepter. Frank and the galactic being meet the supply drivers and share a meal underneath the forest cover. … ”
Moments later, a fleet of meals supply bicycles did certainly seem on the three huge video screens that surrounded us, the entire scene rendered in a charmingly nostalgic fashion suggestive of journey posters from a century in the past. Attached to the handlebars of every bike was a wicker basket overflowing with bounty. The forest, although totally computer-generated, appeared inexperienced and alluring. The story was narrated in dulcet tones by a seemingly Oxbridge-educated fembot.
Da Costa was demonstrating “The Golden Key,” one in every of 4 digital video installations on view in a black field theater on the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher constructing. Collectively referred to as Techne, the installations are closing out the newest version of BAM’s Next Wave Festival with the form of revolutionary choices the group thought it wanted after decreasing its programming and shedding 13 p.c of its workers in 2023.
Techne, which runs by means of Jan. 19, is a competition inside a competition. It is curated and primarily funded by Onassis ONX, a digital tradition initiative by the Onassis Foundation, which constructed the studio and makes its multimillion-dollar amenities accessible to dozens of artists totally free.
The sequence opened on Saturday with “The Vivid Unknown,” an A.I.-driven reimagining by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio of Reggio’s 1982 movie “Koyaanisqatsi.” Next up is “The Golden Key,” which takes its identify from a narrative by the Brothers Grimm, a brief story that invited readers to plan their very own ending greater than 200 years in the past. It can be adopted by “Voices,” a foray into the spirit world by Margarita Athanasiou, a video artist based mostly in Athens, and “Secret Garden,” a group of Black girls’s tales of accomplishment assembled by Stephanie Dinkins, a Brooklyn artist. With the exception of “Voices,” every is interactive, both by sensing the viewers’s response or, within the case of “The Golden Key,” by taking enter instantly by means of pc kiosks on the ground of the theater house.
The finest of those use A.I. to critique expertise — “a machine that’s uncontrolled,” as Fitzgerald known as it. Like “Koyaanisqatsi” — whose title is a Hopi phrase that interprets roughly to “life out of stability” — “The Vivid Unknown” is a principally wordless panoply of sound and pictures signifying humanity’s divorce from nature. But not like the unique movie, the A.I. model accommodates no precise images and no music by Philip Glass; it’s generated by software program that was skilled on Reggio’s movie and Glass’s rating.
Fitzgerald first noticed “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001, when he was an anthropology main at Brown University. He rapidly switched to movie research, and earlier than lengthy he was projecting “Koyaanisqatsi” on the ceiling of his room at house. “My intention was to step contained in the expertise,” he mentioned as we sat at ONX. “It was one of many first occasions I used to be enthusiastic about immersive storytelling.”
Then, a few years in the past, he bought an introduction to Reggio, who by that point was in his 80s and dwelling in Santa Fe, N.M., however not touring. “Who goes to Santa Fe to have coffee with somebody?” Fitzgerald mentioned. “But I did it on a whim.”
“The Vivid Unknown” and the opposite installations in Techne got here to BAM by means of the group’s former president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, who retired in 2015. Now a board member of the Onassis Foundation’s U.S. department, she was the particular person ONX turned to when it was in search of a big, public venue to show the work created in its lab.
“Most of the time you’ve seen this immersive-type stuff in huge spectacles,” Hopkins mentioned in a telephone interview, recalling lightshows that purport to immerse you in works by Van Gogh, for example. “What we’re attempting to do right here is carry it full-on into the performing arts,” the place it might, amongst different issues, be instrumental in attracting right this moment’s equal of the black-clad hipsters who ventured out to Brooklyn in quest of the brand new and experimental 40 years in the past.
Like many arts organizations, BAM remains to be recovering from the pandemic and the drop in attendance and fund-raising that resulted. It has additionally suffered from churn on the high: Its president, Gina Duncan, took over in 2022, and its creative director, Amy Cassello, assumed her present place simply six months in the past after filling in on an interim foundation when her predecessor, the theater producer David Binder, left after 4 years on the job.
With 11 occasions this season, Next Wave appears to be on the rebound from its nadir in 2023, when solely eight works have been introduced, however that’s nonetheless far under the 31 that have been staged in 2017. “We strive to not depend,” Cassello joked once we met at a Brooklyn cafe.
Before he left, Binder made digital media a precedence for BAM. Though Cassello has adopted his lead, she appears an unlikely champion. “I nonetheless don’t perceive the way it works,” she mentioned of “The Golden Key,” “however I respect that you can take part, and the number of outcomes is sort of superb.” And her views on A.I. generally? “I’d put myself within the resistant class, however I belief people who find themselves smarter than myself.”
On the face of it, “The Golden Key” is a digital toy you may work together with to generate wild yarns. But on a deeper degree it affords, as Da Costa put in the course of the preview on the Olympic Tower, “an encounter with a future during which machines are telling us tales” — on this case, fake folks tales.
After feeding an enormous index of folklore to their A.I., Da Costa and his co-creator, Matthew Niederhauser, programmed it to simulate the form of tales that, for hundreds of years and throughout broadly separated civilizations, have advised us who we’re and the place we come from. “Mythology is our frequent foundation for making sense of the world,” Da Costa mentioned as his system surrounded us with beguiling but empty fabrications. But what if somebody arrange autonomous A.I. methods that operated on an industrial scale to manufacture tales that have been meaningless or, worse, false?
Much has been written concerning the havoc social media has wrought, partly as a result of social media firms’ overriding objective is to maximise engagement, and subsequently earnings. “It doesn’t take a lot to consider who’s going to be answerable for these instruments,” Da Costa mentioned. “What are going to be the financial pursuits behind that, and the political pursuits?”
Niederhauser, who had been listening in by video name, added, “This will not be a time for artists to retreat from expertise. It’s an excellent vital time to interact and attempt to make you assume critically about the way it works.”
Techne (introduced by BAM, Onassis and Under the Radar)
Through Jan. 19 at BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn; bam.org/new-media/2024/techne. “The Vivid Unknown” (Jan. 4–5 and seven); “The Golden Key”(Jan. 8–11); “Voices” (Jan. 12 and 14–15); “Secret Garden” (Jan. 16–19).
Jan. 7 at 7:30 p.m.: Special screening of “Koyaanisqatsi” at BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, adopted by a Q. and A. with John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio.
