What power do myths have? Who gets to shape the myths of the future? “The Golden Key” brings audiences into contact with the mythological dreams of an AI as it writes and visualizes a never-ending story.

Imagining a future world that has suffered the worst ravages of climate change, “The Golden Key” invites participants to try to reconstruct a lost mythic past by responding to prompts at computer terminals on the exhibition floor. As the installation unfolds, an open-ended progression of narrative, sight and sound is generated while the work embarks on a process of recombinant storytelling, incorporating the audience’s words with an AI that 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 a work of speculative mythology from a post-climate collapse future, “The Golden Key” allows audiences to encounter and intervene in the new narrative and myth-making powers imagined for AI. By encouraging interaction and play, it seeks to give participants agency in understanding how these tools work, the power to shape their outputs, and a way to imagine alternative futures together. While new technologies may threaten to take our stories and creativity away, this work seeks to disrupt and complicate the process, creating new myths in the process and fostering a sense of collective action through a shared creative act.

Created by Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser

Technical Direction by Aaron Santiago