Can BAM Be a Trailblazer Again Through A.I.?
The Brooklyn organization, seeking new audiences and pushing boundaries, debuts Techne, four digital installations from the Onassis Foundation’s ONX Studio.
“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.
