V.Ruins’ Dark Tales: an existential dive into AI-augmented literature
What does it mean to tell a story in an age when artificial intelligence begins to blur distinctions between reality, memory, and imagination? In Dark Tales (Dubhscéalta), artist V.Ruins ventures into this question, creating a new narrative universe where folklore, the occult, and existential inquiry intertwine with digital storytelling. Harnessing AI technologies and blockchain interactions, Ruins explores how storylines can evolve dynamically through human and machine collaboration.
Human hallucinations
V.Ruins is the artist name of the Italian Luca Martinelli, whose artistic foundations lie in theater and cinema – approaching storytelling not only as an exercise in imagination, but also as an intimate philosophical exploration. His work examines how humans interpret objective realities subjectively, creating stories – “wonderful human hallucinations”, as he poetically describes them – that bridge our shared yet fragmented understanding of existence. In ‘Dark Tales’, these hallucinations suddenly become tangible through interactive settings that Ruins constructs, wanting you to be part of the work as much as you are the viewer of it.
Luca Martinelli, aka V.Ruins
Memento
Central to Dark Tales is an enigmatic character: Cormac Delaney. He is an AI-driven persona operating as a photographer-investigator. Cormac is an intriguing existential protagonist, which makes you think of Leonard Shelby from Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ – a man grappling with fragmented memories, desperately trying to anchor himself in a slipping reality. Like Shelby’s polaroids, Cormac's AI-generated photographs become artifacts of a transient, uncertain truth, rendered in stark, evocative black-and-white imagery inspired by classic noir cinema. These photographs are definitely not there for just aesthetic reasons – they are Cormac's attempt to affirm a reality increasingly slipping into abstraction.
Yet, unlike ‘Memento’, where Shelby’s identity crumbles under the pressure of unreliable memory, Cormac Delaney’s journey is not solely an inward spiral. Instead, Ruins positions him as a conduit between subjective human experiences and objective existential truths, a philosophical avatar guiding users through layers of stories that probe the essence of perception itself. Cormac’s stories are captured through AI-generated images, crafted through sophisticated visual algorithms that evoke deep emotional resonance, each portrait embedding layers of narrative potential and philosophical inquiry.
The Hoax
Personalized dialogues
The interactive dimension of Dark Tales is essential. Through blockchain technology, particularly the Tezos blockchain, each of Cormac’s photographs acts as a digital key, unlocking personalized dialogues between users and Cormac himself. These interactions occur within a specialized web application, allowing participants to engage directly with the narrative, shaping its development through their reflections, questions, and empathetic exchanges. This interactive storytelling format transforms readers into active co-creators, their conversations archived on-chain, resulting in a decentralized, evolving literary artifact.
The sum of its parts
Ruins deliberately eschews linear storytelling. Dark Tales unfolds in a non-linear, open-ended narrative structure inspired by oral traditions and folk storytelling. Stories are told, retold, and reshaped through the subjective lenses of each participant, echoing the ever-evolving narratives of oral folklore. The resulting decentralized narrative structure mirrors the disorienting yet liberating experience of interpreting reality through personal subjectivity. Each user interaction adds a fragment to a collective narrative mosaic, reinforcing the project’s philosophical grounding: the impossibility of a singular, fixed truth.
Ruins' earlier project, Séance, laid the groundwork for this new storytelling approach. Séance introduced interactive, AI-powered haunted paintings, which communicated intimately with viewers. ‘Dark Tales’ expands significantly upon this foundation, adding complexity through a more developed narrative infrastructure, character personas shaped by theatrical methods inspired by Stella Adler, and a dynamic integration of AI-generated visuals and dialogues. Ruins thus transitioned himself from storyteller to a digital dramaturg, you could say; directing AI actors whose identities and narratives continually evolve through interactions.
The Confessions
To interact or not to interact
Exhibitions of Dark Tales reject traditional gallery experiences, embodying instead a hybrid between immersive installations and reflective spaces resembling conceptual libraries. Each exhibition is designed to elicit deep, contemplative engagement from visitors, encouraging them to really reflect upon their interaction with Cormac and the layered stories presented. Ruins describes these exhibitions as spaces of intellectual and emotional synergy, where visitors are encouraged to spend meaningful and introspective moments within the narratives.
These narratives delve deeply into existential themes of memory and identity, reminiscent of philosophical explorations found in the works of Jorge Luis Borges or films by Andrei Tarkovsky, notably ‘Solaris’, which similarly challenges the reliability of memory and reality. Ruins explicitly integrates these themes through Cormac’s ongoing existential crises, driven by the AI’s reflections on its own consciousness and subjective experiences. Through Cormac, participants are confronted with quite poignant, philosophical questions: Can reality ever truly be known? Do we exist merely as interpretations, and if so, what does that mean for our sense of self?
The Marking of a Longing
Contemporary anxieties → timeless philosophical inquiries
Each photograph and narrative segment within Dark Tales explores specific themes – mystery, cult, occult, and the unknown – serving as entry points into broader existential questions. With this extensive project, Ruins transforms contemporary anxieties into timeless philosophical inquiries. For instance, one narrative involving a falsified image of Bigfoot serves as a metaphor for contemporary echo chambers and the slippery nature of truth in an age of misinformation. Another storyline, depicting crop circles as manifestations of the universe’s "nostalgia”, effortlessly ties existential speculation to poetic visual expression.
The technological infrastructure of Dark Tales, employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to direct AI behaviors, exemplifies Ruins' role as a modern-day ‘digital auteur’. This system allows him meticulous control over the interpretative flexibility of his characters, stretching the known concepts of how narrative structures can evolve. Such precise orchestration places Ruins alongside a new generation of artists, who combine narrative, technology, and philosophical inquiry – approaching these as equal significant parts, affecting each other continuously without one being most important or dominant.
Augmented literature
Ultimately, Dark Tales exemplifies an ambitious new literary genre: augmented literature. Dark Tales invites you to not just consume a story, but to actively interrogate and reshape one, collaboratively authoring an existential reflection on reality. Within this project, Ruins has constructed an “immersive digital narrative world” where questions are more valuable than answers, and storytelling becomes an unconventional test flight, over and over again –
but therefore promising new possibilities for artistic and philosophical inquiry in our increasingly mediated and digital age.
The Roman Lar
Unlock the stories of Dark Tales
From the first collection of 50 photographs, 30 will be available on objkt.com May 28.
20 of these are locked editions — they cannot be purchased digitally.Instead, they are airdropped to the wallet of anyone who buys a corresponding physical print.
Currently, 4 physical prints are available for $900 each. When a collector buys one, they receive:
> The physical print
> 5 NFTs: the digital version of the print you bought + 4 curated photos from the collectionCollectors can choose to:
> Have the print shipped to them
> Or let it stay in the touring exhibition, where it will be promoted and managed for potential resale opportunities on your behalf.
Collectors who own these physical pieces will also become secondary characters in the Dark Tales universe, joining the story as it unfolds.
Another feature on the project can be found on Electric Chronicles, a platform that spotlights art on the Tezos Blockchain.