The Golden Key

“The Golden Key” is an interactive installation in which an AI trained on tens of thousands of folktales generates a never-ending mythological narrative. It is built on the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index—a century-old project that sorted folktales from across the Indo-European world into a taxonomy of motifs and archetypes. That effort was an assertion of order, a belief that the world’s unruly stories, passed across millennia, could be named, sorted, and made legible.

“The Golden Key” stages an encounter between that logic and its present-day counterpart. Large language models operate on the same principle—decomposing human expression into patterns and recombining them by structural rules. What it generates is both familiar and uncanny: myths that oscillate between the ancient and the artificial. As visitors type on floor terminals, the story changes—names, feelings, and fragments of their own lives become occasions to examine these future myth-making machines more closely.