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. |