TECHNE | "The Golden Key" @ BAM
“The Golden Key” by Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser Shown as part of TECHNE from Jan 8-11
WHERE: BAM Fisher, Fishman Space 321 Ashland Pl Brooklyn, NY 11217
DATES: Jan 8-11, 2025
HOURS: Wednesday + Thursday + Friday from 7-10pm, Saturday from 2-10pm
"The Golden Key" immerses visitors in the mythical fantasies of an artificially intelligent machine as it composes a never ending story. The work imagines a future world that has endured the severest impacts of climate change. "The Golden Key" is an artifact, a time capsule, a provocation that was left behind in the last days of the old world. It invites participants to reconstruct a lost mythological history by interacting with digital prompts displayed on the exhibition floor. As the narrative progresses, a flowing sequence of stories, visuals, and audio is created by combining visitors' input with an AI system built on tens of thousands of folktales from around the old world, a range of narrative fragments reflecting our most fundamental concerns.
Artificial intelligence is a myth. Tales of Terminator-like machines enslaving humanity seem to coincide with the rapt anticipation of helpful and friendly new entities that will solve all of our problems. However, in the background of this myth making are trillions of dollars of corporate wealth, a new carbon footprint similar to a small country, and a vast amount of uncertainty.
“The Golden Key” explores these deeper underpinnings of machine learning by creating an encounter between myth, machine, and the collective actions of an audience. The work uses as its basis a hundred-year-old academic research database that tries to categorize and structure folktales from around the world into a linked taxonomy, much as Darwin and others had done for nature. This massive effort from an earlier era echoes what is now happening with large language models like ChatGPT, as they try to organize and discern the deep patterns of the world online.
The mythological database at the heart of “The Golden Key” is staggering in its scale, encompassing thousands of plot structures and tens of thousands of story motifs from the Indo-European tradition. Many of these stories date back thousands of years but were not written down until the 16th or 17th centuries. For millennia they were passed along person-to-person, across vast stretches of both time and space. This rather sublime realization suggests a question: what will happen to our myths in the future if our current civilization breaks down?
“The Golden Key” is imagined to be an artifact, a time capsule, a provocation that was left behind in the last days of a world on the brink of climate catastrophe. Left to its own devices, “The Golden Key” will produce an unending series of mythological tales and accompanying visuals. However, audience members are invited to contribute to the narrative, entering their own story elements and histories to become recombined in a perpetual myth-making process.
Through this interaction participants can find a new way of thinking about the rise of generative machine learning technologies, one that gives them a stronger basis to imagine what they are, how they can be used, and what it may mean to create a new future with them. Even if artificial intelligence is a myth, its ending is not yet written.
Marc Da Costa is an artist and anthropologist whose work explores the relationship between emerging technology and lived experience. Da Costa’s artistic research and interactive installations examine how data and technical infrastructures focus our attention on the world in particular ways and, in so doing, shape the structures of experience available to us. Da Costa’s anthropological scholarship has explored these themes through studies of placemaking practices in the Anthropocene, with particular focus on Antarctic research expeditions and critical cartography. Da Costa’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe and his writing on the intersection of data and society has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice and elsewhere.
Matthew Niederhauser is an artist and educator. His work pushes the limits of emerging AI and XR technologies within a wide range of mediums. He studied anthropology at Columbia University before earning his MFA in Art Practice from SVA while also a Pulitzer Center Grantee, Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) and Member of NEW INC. At NEW INC he cofounded Sensorium, an experiential studio working at the forefront of immersive storytelling. When not focusing on projects that have premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Sundance New Frontier, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and IDFA DocLab, he teaches at NYU Tisch and Tandon. Most recently, Matthew became the Technical Director at Onassis ONX in New York.
TECHNE is curated by Onassis ONX, an initiative by Onassis Culture dedicated to the development of new media art and digital experiences. Presented in partnership with Under the Radar and BAM, January 4 through 19, a part of BAM’s Next Wave 2024 and Emerging Visions, as well as Under the Radar ‘25. Visit utrfest.org and bam.org for more information.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is BAM’s Season Sponsor. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by the Mellon Foundation. Leadership support for BAM Access Programs provided by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. Leadership support for Next Wave 2024 provided by Ford Foundation. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by Altman Foundation.
