Artists Marc Da Costa & Matthew Niederhauser Present Expansive Generative Machine Learning Works at SXSW

NEW YORK, MARCH 7, 2024 —The artists Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser, alongside Deloitte, announce today the exhibition of an expansive Extended Reality (XR) installation at SXSW 2024. The experiences, presented with Deloitte, feature the World Premiere of The Golden Key and the US Premiere of Tulpamancer, both of which are in competition at SXSW. Additionally, the artists will debut Beyond the Horizon, a work that brings Da Costa and Niederhauser’s deeply personal immersive storytelling style to commercial applications at the intersection of art and technology, inspiring dynamic innovation through tailored engagement.

The exhibition, filling a 6,000-square-foot space dedicated to showcasing works that interrogate the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for storytelling, will run from March 10th through March 12th at SXSW in Austin, TX ahead of plans to present the art both nationally and internationally. The experiences build on personalized, technology-enabled storytelling, with machine learning algorithms at the heart, to explore diverse applications from memory to the formation of myths to helping us better imagine and plan for the near future. These installations demonstrate the role of art in reimagining the future and inspiring boundless potential to incubate new commercial applications.

“I strongly believe we are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we create and consume media with generative machine learning models,” says Matthew Niederhauser. “These projects explore and foreshadow new ways in which we create emotional bonds with technology using these tools, which in turn will expand our ability to create novel, accessible, and emotionally resonant art and experiences.”  

The newest work in Da Costa and Niederhauser’s continued exploration of machine learning, The Golden Key, is an installation that allows audiences to collectively shape the course of a never-ending fairy tale, generated in real-time by AI. The work explores AI's capacity for myth-making and how such technologies reconfigure social interactions and relationships. The installation, consisting of a room with three full-wall projections and three computer consoles, follows a story arc that evolves based on audience inputs, demonstrating a new standard for personalized experiences. 

Tulpamancer received critical acclaim when it made its World Premiere in the XR exhibition during the 80th Venice International Film Festival. Praised by The Guardian as “one of the hottest tickets" and AnOther Magazine as the “most abiding memory” in Venice’s XR competition, Tulpamancer brings audiences face to face with their memories and dreams, as interpreted by AI. 

"We're excited to be able to share these works at SXSW because they reflect our own attempts to make sense of the social, political, and artistic changes that AI is bringing about," says Marc Da Costa. “Now is the time for us as a society to consider the implications of this new technology in the many aspects of life that it is touching. We hope that the works presented here can offer a different way for audiences to consider them.”

Tulpamancer is already making waves beyond its initial debut, gaining the notice of Deloitte to extend their continuously progressing investments and capabilities in AI, Unlimited Reality, Media Engineering, and experiential engagement to foster unparalleled emotional connections and differentiated insights. By applying the technology-enabled storytelling framework developed by the artists with proprietary industry and technology insights in Beyond the Horizon, Deloitte provides organizations across public and private industries with access to personalized, dynamic narratives that conceptualize a wide range of innovative applications—from understanding how developments in space are shaping new possibilities here on earth to imagining the future of patient care beyond hospital walls.

“The developments in AI and technology-based storytelling have boundless potential to shift paradigms, altering the way we perceive, interact with, and understand the world around us,” says Deborah Golden, Deloitte’s US Chief Innovation Officer. “Through an open collaboration ecosystem, inclusive of artists, technologists, and industry leaders, we hope to spark novel ideas at the intersection of empathetic technology, converged industry applications, and applied innovation that will help our clients leapfrog what was traditionally thought possible to unlock new opportunities for competitive differentiation.” 

Deloitte’s collaboration with Da Costa and Niederhauser will spearhead a new exploration at the intersection of open innovation, art, and experiential storytelling that integrates the physical and virtual world through Generative AI and XR. The collaboration will seek to more broadly apply these concepts in novel ways to address industry challenges, break through traditional barriers, and create a space where stories are not just told – they are experienced and reimagined.

You can learn more about how Deloitte is exploring groundbreaking developments in innovation and engage with Deloitte on X at @Deloitte or on LinkedIn.

TULPAMANCER SYNOPSIS

Tulpamancer explores how the intersection of generative AI and VR can shape new ways of encountering our memories, lives, hopes and dreams. Sitting down at a computer terminal, participants first encounter the tulpa through a series of questions about their lives. They are then invited to meet in a world prepared uniquely for them in VR by the tulpa, embarking on a journey through a series of generated scenes, personalized to the participant, that evoke and question the memories of their past and potential fates. These custom generated experiences are destroyed at the end, left only to resonate in the minds of each participant. Presented by Deloitte. Powered by Onassis ONX Studio.

THE GOLDEN KEY SYNOPSIS

The Golden Key brings audiences into contact with the mythological dreams of an AI as it writes and visualizes a never-ending story. The AI has been trained on tens of thousands of folk tales from around the world, a dataset of narrative fragments that echo our most basic stories and concerns. As the installation proceeds, an infinite progression of narrative, sight and sound unfolds as audience members are invited to take on the role of the "trickster" to actively shape the narrative of this generated story and explore the concealed structures that sit behind AI's purported magic. Presented by Deloitte.

BEYOND THE HORIZON SYNOPSIS

Beyond the Horizon adapts the user experience of Tulpamancer to explore the ways that personalized immersive experiences, made possible by Generative AI and Extended Reality technologies, can inspire greater understanding of areas that are difficult to conceptualize, resulting in lasting impressions and emotional connectivity to some of the most critical imperatives and opportunities facing the world. Beyond the Horizon explores that technology under development in Space today will potentially positively impact people and industries here on earth, from fostering greater sustainability and equity to unlocking new potential for manufacturing and supply chains. Co-designed with Deloitte.

ABOUT MATTHEW NIEDERHAUSER

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.

ABOUT MARC DA COSTA

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.

ABOUT DELOITTE

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500(r) and more than 8,500 U.S.-based private companies. At Deloitte, we strive to live our purpose of making an impact that matters by creating trust and confidence in a more equitable society. We leverage our unique blend of business acumen, command of technology, and strategic technology alliances to advise our clients across industries as they build their future. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Bringing more than 175 years of service, our network of member firms spans more than 150 countries and territories. Learn how Deloitte's approximately 457,000 people worldwide connect for impact at www.deloitte.com.

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