Every time a tech company promotes an emerging technology like AI or the metaverse, the pitch sounds the same: a promise to “unleash” the imagination, or a new “immersive world.”

When Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, its ad showed four people looking at Henri Rousseau’s Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo, as it sprung to life and a portal opened before them. Four years later, when Meta debuted its Ray–Ban Meta smartglasses, the company touted its in-lens display and voice activation with an ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt looking at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, i.e. the banana, which Hemsworth promptly ate. What does it say about our collective consciousness that the direction of tech innovation seems to always lead to that scene in Mary Poppins, when the nanny and her wards jump onto a chalk drawing and end up in an animated world? That question lay at the center of several works performed at Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) earlier this month.