Event
The Golden Key: an immersive study of global myths
A public encounter with a machine that generates an endless series of mythological tales.
The Golden Key is a work created by Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser, who in their creation start from two questions: What power do myths have? Who has the power to shape the myths of the future?
The answer is an endless conversation between a human being and an artificial intelligence “educated” by a century-old academic database that catalogs and structures fairy tales from around the world. A folk and epic tale that transforms and knots itself around the audience’s prompts. Simple or complex questions, moods, fears, give birth to a new mythology, sheltered from the dystopian manipulation of big tech.
The Golden Key according to the two authors is an artifact, a provocation left behind in the last hypothetical days of the old world to create a threshold to the collective memory of humankind.
Winner of the Jury Prize in the SXSW XR Experience competition in 2024, The Golden Key allows the audience to engage and intervene in the new powers of storytelling and creation of a mythology reworked by artificial intelligence.
Authors
Marc Da Costa is an artist and anthropologist whose work explores the relationship between emerging technologies and lived experience. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and his writings on the intersection of data and society have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice, and other publications.
Matthew Niederhauser is an artist and educator. His work pushes the boundaries of emerging artificial intelligence and extended reality (XR) technologies within a wide range of mediums, exploring concepts that blur the line between the digital and the physical. His training in anthropology and photography has led him to collaborations with The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times, and he has made installations that have debuted at the Venice Film Festival, Sundance, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and IDFA DocLab.
The artwork
The installation immerses visitors in a narrative universe generated by an artificial intelligence that composes endless stories. Set in a future context where climate change has radically transformed our planet, the work is a legacy from the last days of the world as we know it today.
A cultural and anthropological bridge that invites viewers to engage with the narrative and mythological potential of artificial intelligence, allowing them not only to observe but also to actively interact with the creative process.
The myth of artificial intelligence
The two authors start from a provocative premise: artificial intelligence itself is a myth. On the one hand, we have the dystopian narrative of Terminator-like machines threatening to subdue humanity; on the other, the utopian vision of benevolent entities capable of solving all our problems.
However, behind these conflicting narratives lie concrete realities: colossal economic investments, an ecological footprint comparable to that of small countries, and a vast territory of uncertainty about the future of these technologies.
The concept
Central to the construction of The Golden Key is a century-old academic database that catalogs and structures fairy tales from around the world, organizing them into a taxonomy similar to the one Darwin developed for the natural sciences. This historical project surprisingly resonates with current efforts of language models such as ChatGPT, which attempt to organize and identify the deep patterns of information available online.
The vastness of anthropological heritage
The scale of the mythological database used for the work is of impressive proportions, encompassing thousands of narrative structures and tens of thousands of recurring motifs in the stories of the Indo-European tradition.
Many of these tales have very ancient origins, dating back thousands of years, although they have only been transcribed since the 16th-17th centuries. Before then, these stories were transmitted orally from generation to generation, crossing immense geographic and temporal barriers.
Cultural transmission between human and artificial intelligence
This mode of cultural transmission raises a fundamental question: what will be the fate of our myths if contemporary civilization collapses? The Golden Key is proposed as a time capsule, an artifact left behind in the last days of a world on the brink of climate catastrophe. When left to operate independently, the installation produces an endless stream of mythological tales accompanied by visual representations.
Interaction with the audience
The most innovative aspect of the work is the invitation to the audience to actively contribute to the narrative. Visitors can input personal narrative elements, urgent questions, and fictional assumptions that are then integrated and recombined in the ongoing process of mythological creation.
This interaction opens up a humanistic perspective on generative machine learning technology, providing a firmer basis for imagining what these technologies represent, how they can be used, and what implications they might have for our collective future.
