Dark Tales: beyond the book

Dark Tales is an augmented literature project that intertwines Gothic storytelling, Artificial Intelligence and blockchain to raise a radical question: what does it mean to narrate, interpret and be interpreted in the age of data? Through narrative agents such as Cormac Delaney and Edmund McAllister, the work transforms the reader into an interlocutor and the dialogue into a traceable archive.

«If one works with darkness, it is because it is the best place to highlight the light», says Luca Martinelli, aka Vandalo Ruins, the author of Dark Tales¹, a project of augmented literature that merges storytelling, installation and Artificial Intelligence. In this constellation of gothic micro-myths, literature becomes a system that listens and responds to those who interact with it, mirroring them. The latest public incarnation of the project takes the form of an exhibition-installation, Dark Tales: Edmund’s Bazaar, shown in Paris. Dark Tales, however, is also an itinerant project that since 2025 has crossed different contexts: from Milan’s MIA Photofair to galleries such as Max-y Gallery in Florence, all the way to fairs and web communities, precisely because, as the author argues, distribution (and not only writing) is the ground on which literature is played today. Here is how.

Literature as code to be interpreted

For Luca Martinelli, Dark Tales arises from a question that is both technical and philosophical: can literature remain confined within a closed, printed text, or can it transform into an interactive experience? «The idea», he explains, «is to try to understand whether the union of literature with new AI-based systems can transform the modes of consumption and distribution of literature itself». An idea also nourished by the belief that literature «has always been an interactive work», in which the author, even before the digital age, «wrote codes with words in order to create reproducible results within the human mind». In other words, sentences that ask to be activated by the reader’s mind and that produce effects only when they are executed — that is, read. In this sense, the text provides all the elements enabling the reader to recreate the experience within themselves and “execute the code”, processing, interpreting or even completing it. As Martinelli states:

«A work is complete if it is understood, and to be understood it must be interpreted».

Dark Tales simply makes this logic explicit — placing the interpretative act at the centre — through a series of narrative anthologies, around seventy, which Martinelli has written for the characters and which function as a sort of invisible archive inaccessible to the “reader”. They have, in fact, been transformed into datasets: the knowledge base of the characters — narrative agents. The only way these stories can emerge is through interaction between human and machine. «Each anthology is composed of two stories», Martinelli explains, «an “objective” one with context and facts and a “subjective” one with the filter of how those facts and contexts were experienced by the character. Each anthology is actually an excuse to introduce a concept that will be interpreted differently each time depending on the individual user». This line of research finds its predecessors in Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. «Calvino», Martinelli explains, «was one of the first authors to conceive the book as an open device: a combinatory structure that asks the reader to actively participate in constructing meaning».

«Pirandello had already imagined the literary genre as something that could exceed the book, transporting writing into metatheatre, where fiction reflects upon itself and the narrative mechanism is exposed».

With Dark Tales, literature is transported into the digital world.

The narrative agents of Dark Tales

Cormac Delaney was the first character created for Dark Tales: an early twentieth-century photographer-investigator moving between documentation and obsession, constantly questioning his own authenticity. Over the course of his investigation he realises that his life is nothing more than a narrative inscribed within a larger system, almost a pre-determined script. From Cormac Delaney, in a kind of Borgesian labyrinth, all the other characters cascade into existence: Edmund McAllister, for instance, at the centre of the new installation Dark Tales: Edmund’s Bazaar hosted at Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris, is a transhumanist alchemist whom Cormac photographs and who from the outset reveals himself to be a brain “in brine”, surviving his own experiments. Obsessed with the idea of transferring consciousness into a synthetic medium, he pursues what he calls the “data soul”, the soul as a set of replicable data. McAllister is also the “curator” of the Paris bazaar where he manages artists and collects works. Among the artists is Alison McBride, who seems haunted by dark presences but in fact embodies the weight of collective crises and unresolved memories. To free herself she must paint them, trapping these ghosts inside her canvases. The ghosts — such as Evelin, Musashi and Dimitri — are entities made of remorse, obsession and pain. They are not spirits in the traditional sense but aggregates of memories and data. Their identity evolves over time, demonstrating that even what appears fixed can be rewritten. Then there is Dubduine, a Gaelic term meaning “dark people”, a figure Martinelli defines as “the horror of interpretation”, a presence that observes and analyses whoever looks at it. Its power is not to frighten but to return an image of oneself that one does not recognise — the most explicit metaphor of the digital twin.

Each of these characters takes shape within the installation «through different methods of interaction», Martinelli explains, «in which the digital is always accompanied by a material equivalent». Edmund McAllister, for example, is a vocal agent embodied in a wooden cabinet with a visible three-dimensional brain. One sits in front of him, greets him and asks a question: the words are converted into text (speech-to-text²), processed by an agent based on language models. This agent uses three data tables, accessed through system prompt³ , and selects which ones to consult depending on what the user says. The response is then returned in audio form through a text-to-speech² system.

In some works this experience also extends to the blockchain⁵, where interactions can be recorded and preserved as permanent traces for those who own and “collect” specific non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Cormac Delaney, for example, appears as a textual conversational terminal in which the user selects a photograph and begins a dialogue that starts from the narrative context and gradually moves towards more personal ground. At the end of the interaction, the conversation is printed on thermal paper and physically displayed in the space. The selected photograph itself can be purchased as an NFT: the interaction will be recorded as metadata associated with the digital work.

The ghosts, however, are where blockchain enters the picture in a more structural way. These consist of material canvases — prints on canvas treated with varnishes and textures to evoke traditional painting — alongside tablets on which an agent generates the ghost’s memories. Each image-output is an NFT that becomes part of an evolving collection. Collectors can intervene by sending a suggestion that modifies the ghost’s memory. «If that ghost, for example Musashi, had trouble interacting with people and seventy collectors, by purchasing the token, sent a suggestion on how to be more social, the agent processes that suggestion, generates a new version of the image and records it again on-chain». The ghost’s identity becomes a public and traceable dataset, continuously rewritten but never erased.

  “These are not horror stories”

There is a paradox running through the entire interview: Dark Tales emerges from a gothic imaginary and draws on Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky and the metaphysical labyrinths of Borges, yet rejects the label of horror entertainment. «Horror folklore, if anything, is a vector in which every story carries an existential lesson disguised as the occult», Martinelli explains, and darkness is merely a stage set to bring light into focus. Cormac himself, in the anthology, abandons the idea of being an autonomous individual and transforms into a system “bias”, becoming a filter for observing the narrative world.

«He understands that he can become a vector of change in how the book narrates and understands the stories or the data it receives from users. I also see it as a possible resolution for myself».

«Perhaps my place in the world does not lie in defending my individuality at all costs, in having to constantly justify my presence with its needs, fears and complexities. I am interested in the idea of abstracting away from the individual to become part of a collective, global function, where the time you have in life is the time necessary to generate those data and those directions that can continue to act beyond you. I think what we are experiencing in relation to the digital is a horror film, but at the same time, within Dark Tales, there is also a great deal of hope. In Dark Tales even ghosts can be changed: if enough people “suggest” a direction, which is itself a vector».

For Martinelli, therefore, anxiety arises from the relationship with a “digital twin” that accumulates data, anticipates choices and guides behaviour, and Dark Tales, with its universe of agents and interactions, aims to provide a counter-proposal. If in everyday digital life our data are collected and centralised by platforms over which we have no real control, here the mechanism is declared, traceable and limited. Ultimately, Martinelli defines blockchain as «a database», with a crucial difference lying in the type of trust and constraint involved. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of cryptographically signed transactions, organised into interconnected blocks in a way that makes modifications evident and increasingly difficult over time. «Precisely because the ledger is distributed», Martinelli explains, «and not centralised like other systems, it is not possible to “manipulate” those data at will».

«As an artist, I feel responsible for the secure and ethical preservation of the data we produce and that will remain as our “vectors”».

As for the impact on the public, Martinelli speaks of wonder: seeing in visitors’ eyes «the perception of a fiction that has become real». The gallery as a space of suspended judgement, where one can believe that in Paris there really exists a bazaar run by a brain in brine.

---

1. Read more: https://darktales.xyz/ ↩︎
2. Speech-to-Text (STT) is an artificial intelligence–based technology that converts human speech into written text by analyzing sounds, phonemes, and linguistic context. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is an artificial intelligence–based technology that transforms written text into natural-sounding synthetic speech, generating audio through advanced neural models. Both rely on deep learning algorithms that learn from data to understand and reproduce human language. ↩︎
3. System prompt is the top-level instruction entered when an Artificial Intelligence model is launched to define its role, tone, rules and objectives. It establishes the agent’s general behaviour before interacting with the user and guides all subsequent responses. ↩︎
4. Speech-to-Text (STT) is an artificial intelligence–based technology that converts human speech into written text by analyzing sounds, phonemes, and linguistic context. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is an artificial intelligence–based technology that transforms written text into natural-sounding synthetic speech, generating audio through advanced neural models. Both rely on deep learning algorithms that learn from data to understand and reproduce human language. ↩︎
5. Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger: a database shared across a network of computers, where information is recorded in a traceable manner and cannot be modified unilaterally. An NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a digital certificate recorded on the blockchain that certifies the ownership and uniqueness of a digital work or content. In the context of Dark Tales, collectors are those who purchase these NFTs: they do not just buy an image, but gain access to specific features of the work — such as additional interactions or the ability to record conversations and edit memories — which are also tracked on the blockchain. ↩︎