Stories for Children Lost in the Woods (2024)
Stories for Children Lost in the Woods is a multimedia narrative work that explores the storytelling potential of generative artificial intelligence. An AI avatar is projected on a large, uneven surface. The voice of the avatar is also AI-generated and trained through field recordings from the site of presentation. The text can be scripted or generative.
Future experiments will focus on real-time responses. The video below is a scripted text developed for outdoor presentation at Ferme Lanthorn in Quebec, Canada and for Shipwreck at SÍM Hlöðuloftið in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Stories for Children Lost in the Woods
This projection-based work features an AI-created avatar speaking with a voice trained on field recordings from its location. It is a storyteller, albeit a fragmented one, and an effort to animate the genre of horror and/or fairy tales leveraging generative AI tools.
The work explores the unsettling experience of making a home in a world filled with incomprehensible objects. The avatar embodies the horror of the monological, a singular perspective that sees and sorts us as means to an end, rather than valuing us as ends unto ourselves.
In this piece, the AI avatar doesn't “see” the whole of its audience or of the stories it tells. Rather, it dissects us and the stories that offer life coherence into parts and categories, fragmenting the self. If myths are the means by which the cosmos knows itself and human beings the vehicle for this knowledge, what do these stories represent.
Who is speaking? Who is listening?
