“For those who control the bard, control everything,” The Matrix film series actor Hugo Weaving ominously says in a voiceover in the trailer of MAYA, a transmedia narrative universe developed by director Anand Gandhi (Ship of Theseus, 2012; Tumbbad, 2018) and game designer Zain Memon (Shasn).
Earlier this year, the first asset of the universe was unveiled. A novel called MAYA: Seed Takes Root. The book revolves around a fictional planet called Neh where a biological network of sentient trees, called Maya, acts as a “living internet.” “Every citizen “tethers” daily to Maya, entering shared dreamscapes to work, learn and seek whatever flavours of impossible their hearts desire. The immortal Divyas harvest this data to see billions of possible futures. They don't rule through force. “Why issue commands when you can shape desires?” Everyone is tracked. Everyone is “nudged”. Except one,” reads the synopsis.
The universe seems to be an allegory to the current culture, being shaped by algorithms and artificial intelligence. “A myth for the 21st century,” is how Anand Gandhi puts it.
In a geeky-chat, we spoke to Anand about the first seed of the idea for MAYA, the need for expanding this universe across mediums like films, graphic novels, games and even toys, what he thinks about the future of AI, and more.
Excerpts:
Tell me about the genesis of MAYA
The desire was to create a map of the world we are currently in. What kind of mythology does a post AI world, a world that has been witnessing a moral and cultural crisis, need? How do we create a story for the 21st century where we have the ability to grow food in space but are unable to feed half a billion of our own people? We have a near-sentient being in our phones which can give answers to any questions we have and still there is such widespread misinformation. How do you reconcile with a world which has stone-age emotions, industrial-age institutions and space-age technologies? That’s where MAYA began for us.
What is your opinion on AI in filmmaking and other art forms?
I feel AI-generated culture is going to be a part of our lives as long as we live. So, we can’t really stop AI from venturing into filmmaking. The cat is out of the bag. The question is how can we educate an entire population to protect itself from the hacks that are trying to manipulate them with the use of AI imagery.
But can AI ever replicate a human experience? A poet sometimes doesn’t know from which part of his subconscious a piece of poetry emerged from. An actor, in just a small gesture, conveys something which maybe even the director didn’t instruct him on, but the audience receives it. Can AI ever possess this unconscious unpredictability of humans?
I don’t think it is so set in stone. Humans aren’t that unpredictable and AI isn’t that predictable either. There have been instances of AI models hallucinating. Every cognitive system synthesizes and replicates first and then it starts imagining and dreaming. Amidst all of this, the thing to think about is that is there a need for human art, for human intervention? And the answer is yes, because we are still behind the steering wheel.
MAYA expands to various mediums. The first book came out early this year called MAYA: Seed Takes Root. There are also going to be films, games, toys and graphic novels. Why this multi-media approach?
The first thing to understand is that there is not one story which will be showcased across various mediums. We have written a vast, sprawling mythology of hundreds of different tales. It’s like the hero of one story is the villain in another, the background of one can be the forefront for another. The whole MAYA universe is designed in a way that you can enter through one story and then hop on to any other. It’s a network and not a linear graph. The reason we wanted for it to have different mediums is because we wanted the story to determine what form it should take. If a tale needs active participation, we made it into a game. If it needs the viewer to just immerse themselves, it has been made into a film.
What does it take to create such a vast science fiction universe? What were your influences, inspirations?
Oh, the list is endless. Both me and Zain don’t consume films or games any more for inspiration. For MAYA, we actually read into a wide variety of political sciences and that included stuff like peer-reviewed journals. The list of people whose writings inspired us is very broad and includes E.O. Wilson (American biologist, naturalist), Richard Dawkins (British evolutionary biologist; famous advocate of atheism), Charles Darwin (English naturalist; gave the theory of natural selection), Kabir (Indian mystic and poet), Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff (American media theorists), BR Ambedkar and Gandhi, to name a few.
Are there any science fiction films that you like?
So many! I will start with Contact (1997; directed by Robert Zemeckis), one of the greatest science fiction films in my opinion. Denis Villineuve’s Arrival (2016), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; directed by Stanley Kubrick), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and Solaris (1972), among others.