Role: Artist, Designer, Developer
Context: Burningman 2024
Location: Black Rock City
Audience: 80,000 festivalgoers
Freestanding interactive art installation
The idea:
With the ubiquity of ChatGPT, and its incessant cheerleading and positive optimism, we wanted to explore an LLM model with a different personality. Embracing Dadaism, the piece reflects on the absurdity and humor of AI. It questions technology’s reliability and explores the nature of consciousness. We conditioned a small LLM to run locally that was neither helpful or beneficent. Visitors pick up an antique phone sitting on a credenza. Speaking into the phone, the installation displays it’s response on a digital ticker tape mounted high on a tower. The tower is a self-supporting hyperbolic paraboloid.
The Space:
The art installation sits on the vast flat playa of Burningman. There is no power or services so all of the materials have to be brough to the site. Because the installation is unattended, it has to be lit prominently at night and designed in such a way that intrepid participants are dissuaded from climbing.
The Execution:
This project was entirely supported by donations so economy in design and execution was a primary consideration. The structure we settled on was one of the most parsimonious in terms of the amount of mass to the height. The hyperbolic paraboloid is self-supporting and only needs its members to be attached at one end to stand securely. In addition, everything involved in the piece had to be transported to the desert site and constructed without aid of lifts. The compute The LED display was controlled by an Arduino, messaging and sound digitization by a Raspberry pi and the LLM and voice was all run locally on a consumer 8GB GPU on a low end computer.
The Outcome:
Participants who interacted with the piece came away surprised and delighted. this was a challenging build. The software development was difficult and we were a bit understaffed to finish comfortably. Luckily we were able to prevail on some other artists at the site to help us with some of the technical issues and we got the piece up and running for the festival. Although many artworks are burned at the end of the festival, the tower was so well regarded that we decided to keep it and use it as the basis for some future piece that needs a tower support. Once again, in the future, I will likely focus on more abstract interactions with participants. The technology should be invisible so that they can engage with the idea.