The first thing that stands out are the blood -red data cables that run straight through the walls as long strings of candy veter with strawberry flavor. They fit well with the pink-red walls and curtains in the memory palace of the bodyless female voice in the virtual reality experience driven by AI The Great Orator. She takes you from the after -other to the hereafter. The Great Orator From artist Daniel Ernst and writer Thomas Möhlmann this year was selected for the Venice Immersive competition of the Venice Film Festival.
“This interactive VR can take as long as electricity and a spectator are in principle infinitely. You can explore the whole house, and the immense car graveyard around it. Every time you touch an object with your virtual hands, you hear the memories of the disappeared resident of the house,” summarizes the experience of the Bug in The Hague, where he summarizes the last bug in The Hague is. “Or is it your own memories? If you click again, the story has been subtly adjusted by AI.”
It is as if you are walking through the home of a deceased person. Look, this was her teapot, and this her wine glass, and here on this photo you can see how happy she was. That elusive cloud of anecdotes is a beautiful and desolate metaphor for a mainframe computer or a server. You have to be careful not to get lost. Or is sucked asleep by the hypnotic voice.
Golden Calf
Ernst is no stranger in the world of VR, games and interactive works. In 2019 he won a Golden Calf for Best ‘Interactive’ at the Nederlands Film Festival for his project ‘Die Fernweh Oper’, one of the ‘Shoebox dioramas’ that he has been working on since 2012. This year, the Netherlands is again well represented in the Venice Immersive program, with the Belgian-Dutch co-production A Long Goodbye (about dementia) and the Bengaals-Saoedian Arabic-Dutch Mirage (that a life with depression and anxiety disorders wants to make it felt). Further Ancestors Van Steye Hallema and The Smartphone Orchestra in Best of Experiences, which collects the best immersive experiences of the past festival season. The theatrical group experience was previously on display in IDFA’s Doclab and takes the audience into the future through their smartphone, a selfie and a smart algorithm in rapidthreinvaart.
Also The Great Orator uses various technologies, of cinematic 3D architectures, to game elements and generative AI that modifies Möhlmann’s texts and adapts to current events. “The story is loosely based on controversial alternative healers such as Char and Jomanda and similar oracles who reach their followers through communication media, from TV dominese to politicians who communicate through social media,” says Ernst. His interest in TV mediums, conspiracy theories, myths and other stories to explain reality arose because he grew up in “the sober Netherlands, but in the summer holidays with his grandparents in the Serbian countryside was and saw how deep their belief in paranormal things was”.
“All TV mediums will sooner or later be accused of scams,” Ernst discovered. And he wondered: “What if such a medium does not get discredited, and can grow endlessly, until it can ultimately upload his consciousness in the cloud?” Then Trump and other political populists who use the language of TV dominese came to influence people politically. And suddenly his artistic thought experiment became reality. “All those populists have the scandal one after the other, but no one seems to care. Perhaps because they indeed promise their followers as TV gurus to solve all their problems.”
Talk to psychosis
In the desire of people to transfer the responsibility for their actions to gods or their self -proclaimed human intermediaries, he saw parallels with how people are currently asking their life questions, or having an algorithm determine their choices. “It doesn’t surprise me that AI is getting so big now, because this makes the world feasible for everyone in their own way and you are the center of the universe, until a chatbot talks to you a psychosis.”
So far it goes in The Great Orator Not, but the longer you listen to the voice of the Oracle, the more she knows how to convince you that without your world does not exist, that you are the crucial factor in the survival of proclamations: “AI offers an infinity of false memories,” says Ernst. How long does it take before the orator asks me to transfer money, never let me in greeting again or to buy a lot of vitamin preparations? And what exactly did she say, except that she has talked to me and got me in her ban to go along with investigating the promise and the call of infinity?
“Infinity is twisted lonely if there are no other people to give meaning,” says Ernst. He again refers to Jorge Luis Borges, to his story ‘The Library of Babel’, which describes the universe as an infinite library. “After having worked with AI for a few years, you could think that the answer to every question can be found, but that only makes sense if you already know what you are looking for.
“VR and AI are ideal for artistic research into things that would otherwise be speculative or unscientific,” he thinks. “For us, for example, creating infinity was the most important thing, our AI does not learn, but it must seem to be the appearance that it is smarter and eager than it is. In that respect The Great Orator Also a kind of wizard of OZ with us behind the curtain. It frustrates me that people in the film industry think that you can replace creativity with generative AI. How do you say that? Convenience is the devil’s messenger. ”