“Techne,” one of the shows that opened the 20th anniversary “Under the Radar” festival this weekend, reinforces its reputation for theater so experimental it makes you wonder what theater is. Comprised of a series of four “digital artworks” that will unfold over the next two weeks at BAM Fisher, “Techne” begins with “The Vivid Unknown,” which the program describes as an “AI driven immersive installation.”
To the untutored audience member, “The Vivid Unknown” seems to be a series of seemingly random images — desert plateaus and city skylines, laundromats and rocket ships, wheat fields and explosions — projected onto a triptych of movie screens that people can stand or sit in front of, casting their shadows onto the images in sometimes fun ways.
But the program for “Techne” makes some lofty claims for the installation’s significance, not least because of its provenance, explaining that “The Vivid Unknown” is a reimagining of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film “Koyaanisqatsi.”
“Koyaanisqatsi” gained cult status for its awesome images of majestic landscapes, both natural and man-made, and startling juxtapositions – people sun bathing on a beach near a power plant, closeups of microchips interspersed with satellite imagery of entire cities — which employed a range of cinematic techniques (time-lapse photography, montage editing, slow motion, reverse motion) by the inventive cinematographer Ron Fricke. There is no conventional plot, no characters, and no dialogue. The sound is dominated by an insistent minimalist score by the famed avant-garde composer Phillip Glass (probably best known then and now for the operas “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha.”)
First-time filmmaker Godfrey Reggio explained his film as being about a “life out of balance” – that’s what “Koyaanisqatsi” means in the Hopi language – a world in which technology is clashing with nature and threatening to consume it.
“I’m not sure that it conveys the ideas Mr. Reggio has in mind,” critic Vincent Canby wrote in a review of the film the year it debuted, “but it’s certainly not boring.”
Reggio, now in his eighties, is credited with co-creating “The Vivid Unknown” along with John Fitzgerald, cofounder of Sensorium, which he describes as “an experiential studio working at the intersection of art, design, and technology.” (Both Fitzgerald and Reggio will be available for a Q and A after a screening of the original “Koyaanisqatsi” at BAM on January 7 – Reggio virtually from his studio in New Mexico.)
The new installation uses the film’s “pre-Internet archive,” as Fitzgerald writes in the program, filtered through “a computer vision and a machine learning model” to enable visitors to “explore the primal nexus of humans, nature and technology” while “dynamically participating in shaping the unfolding narrative.”
Visitors at BAM’s Fisher are allocated 90 minutes to watch – sorry, participate in — “The Vivid Unknown,” which is about the length of the original movie. The installation also has a Philip Glass-like score, by composer Ben Shrifken, and some of the images at least recall some from the movie, such as the sun bathers near the power plant. But it was not the movie. The pacing was less varied – more consistently frenetic — the images were more repetitive.
I was originally skeptical about the creative team’s claim that our presence was “shaping the narrative.” The only direct evidence of this, from a technological standpoint, were the moments when the screens went black except for the shadows cast by individual visitors, when the outlines of their bodies now filled with the partial image of a mountain range or a rocket launch or a not-quite-recognizable swirl of color.
This effect was not only aesthetically pleasing – evoking for me some kind of tie-dyed psychedelic lightshow — it also caused some wonderfully watchable behavior: One woman waved her arms in a kind of ballet, a trio of teenagers posed together and apart testing the effect, a young boy threw his jacket in the air. This became the story to me – so, yes, I suppose in this way the visitors were shaping the narrative of the show. They were the actors.
I found some validation for my reaction by lucking into conversations with Jazia Hammoudi, program director of Onassis ONX NY, producers of “Techne,” and Bonnie Kim, an art historian who is coordinating a separate forthcoming exhibition of Internet art Graphic Serendipity, and was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable visitor to “The Vivid Unknown.” They both helped me cut through the lingo of the program. They helped me see, for example, how “The Vivid Unknown” carries the themes of the original movie into the 21st century – how the accelerated pace was not a coincidence, it’s emblematic of the increased information overload from four decades ago; and how the individual visitors shadow-casting is symbolic of the way that our connection with technology has become more personal.
Admittedly, after about an hour in, I was one of the few visitors remaining (Kim was one of the handful in our 90-minute time slot who also stuck around.) This was perhaps another difference from the movie, which was “certainly not boring.” There was no such certainty here. But even the tedium of The Vivid Unknown, if that’s what it was – its apparent shapelessness, its lack of clarity about the passage of time – got me to wondering: Does time have a shape? Does art need a shape? These are the sort of questions that arise when you stare for a long time at a work of art.
The Vivid Unknown is being presented only through January 7. It is followed by the three other works of “Techne” that also play out on the three screens at Fishman Space in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, are called installations, and also have no in-person actors. They too are hard to summarize, but I’ll try. (Best to get more at the links.)
The Golden Key, January 8 – 11, Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser’s “interactive art installation” that taps into a database (excuse me, an “AI system”) of tens of thousands of folk tales
Voices, January 12 – 15, Margarita Athanasiou’s “cinematic installation” that’s a “video essay about the history of channeling practices” focused on her mother.
Secret Garden, January 16 – 19, generations of oral histories of Black women gathered by Stephanie Dinkins into “a spatialized floral estate”
