“A journalist finds himself in the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, was speaking from the controls of an artificial intelligence-driven video installation at the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio, a high-tech media lab in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. He was talking to the computer that runs this installation. About me.
“A huge fleet of food delivery bicycles appears,” Da Costa continued, spinning a nonsense tale the A.I. would soon render onscreen. “The heavens open and a galactic, friendly being comes down with a scepter. Frank and the galactic being meet the delivery drivers and share a meal under the forest canopy. … ”
Moments later, a fleet of food delivery bicycles did indeed appear on the three enormous video screens that surrounded us, the whole scene rendered in a charmingly nostalgic style suggestive of travel posters from a century ago. Attached to the handlebars of each bike was a wicker basket overflowing with bounty. The forest, though entirely computer-generated, looked green and inviting. The tale was narrated in dulcet tones by a seemingly Oxbridge-educated fembot.
Da Costa was demonstrating “The Golden Key,” one of four digital video installations on view in a black box theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher building. Collectively known as Techne, the installations are closing out the latest edition of BAM’s Next Wave Festival with the kind of innovative offerings the organization thought it needed after reducing its programming and laying off 13 percent of its staff in 2023.
Techne, which runs through Jan. 19, is a festival within a festival. It is curated and funded by Onassis ONX, a digital culture initiative by the Onassis Foundation, which built the studio and makes its multimillion-dollar facilities available to dozens of artists for free.
The series opened on Saturday with “The Vivid Unknown,” an A.I.-driven reimagining 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 tale 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, a video artist based in Athens, and “Secret Garden,” a collection of Black women’s stories of achievement assembled by Stephanie Dinkins, a Brooklyn artist. With the exception of “Voices,” each is interactive, either by sensing the audience’s response or, in the case of “The Golden Key,” by taking input directly through computer kiosks on the floor of the theater space.
The best of these use A.I. to critique technology — “a machine that’s out of control,” as Fitzgerald called it. Like “Koyaanisqatsi” — whose title is a Hopi word that translates roughly to “life out of balance” — “The Vivid Unknown” is a mostly wordless panoply of sound and images signifying humanity’s divorce from nature. But unlike the original film, the A.I. version contains no actual photography and no music by Philip Glass; it’s generated by software that was trained on Reggio’s film and Glass’s score.
Fitzgerald first saw “Koyaanisqatsi” in 2001, when he was an anthropology major at Brown University. He quickly switched to film studies, and before long he was projecting “Koyaanisqatsi” on the ceiling of his room at home. “My intention was to step inside the experience,” he said as we sat at ONX. “It was one of the first times I was thinking about immersive storytelling.”
Then, a couple of years ago, he got an introduction to Reggio, who by that time was in his 80s and living in Santa Fe, N.M., 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 in Techne came to BAM by way of the organization’s former president, Karen Brooks Hopkins, who retired in 2015. Now a board member of the Onassis Foundation’s U.S. branch, she was the person ONX turned to when it was seeking a large, public venue to display the work created in its lab.
“Most of the time you’ve seen this immersive-type stuff in big spectacles,” Hopkins said in a phone interview, recalling lightshows that purport to immerse you in works by Van Gogh, for instance. “What we’re trying to do here is bring it full-on into the performing arts,” where it could, among other things, be instrumental in attracting today’s equivalent of the black-clad hipsters who ventured 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 drop in attendance and fund-raising that resulted. It has also suffered from churn at the top: Its president, Gina Duncan, took over in 2022, and its artistic director, Amy Cassello, assumed her current position 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 11 events this season, Next Wave seems to be on the rebound from its nadir in 2023, when only eight works were presented, but that’s still far below the 31 that were staged in 2017. “We try not to count,” Cassello joked when we met at a Brooklyn cafe.
Before he left, Binder made digital media a priority for BAM. Though Cassello has followed his lead, she seems an unlikely champion. “I still don’t understand how it works,” she said of “The Golden Key,” “but I appreciate that you could participate, and the variety of outcomes is quite amazing.” And her views on A.I. in general? “I would put myself in the resistant category, but I trust people who are smarter than myself.”
On the face of it, “The Golden Key” is a digital toy you can interact with to generate wild yarns. But on a deeper level it offers, as Da Costa put during in the preview at the Olympic Tower, “an encounter with a future in which machines are telling us stories” — in this case, faux folk tales.
After feeding a massive index of folklore to their A.I., Da Costa and his co-creator, Matthew Niederhauser, programmed it to simulate the kind 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 beguiling yet empty fabrications. But what if someone set up autonomous A.I. systems that operated on an industrial scale to fabricate stories that were meaningless or, worse, false?
Much has been written about the havoc social media has wrought, in part because social media companies’ overriding goal is to maximize engagement, and therefore profits. “It doesn’t take much to think about who is going to be in control of these tools,” Da Costa said. “What are going to be the economic interests behind that, and the political interests?”
Niederhauser, who had been listening in by video call, added, “This is not a time for artists to retreat from technology. It’s a super important time to engage and try to make you think critically about how it works.”
Techne (presented 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 7); “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, followed by a Q. and A. with John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio.