Chris Salter in collaboration with Sofian Audry, Takashi Ikegami, Alexandre Saunier and Thomas Spier
Totem is a commission for the Barbican Centre London’s massive 2019 exhibition AI: More Than Human. This is large-scale, 14 meter tall light installation asks whether an artificial entity can develop autonomy and consciousness. The installation’s body consists of 10 steel fabricated, double sided light boxes, more than 6000 LEDs, lenticular lenses and sense organs consisting of cameras and microphones together with a range of machine learning algorithms that generate the Totem’s behavior. The installation exerts its presence on its onlookers through changes in its brightness, rhythms and patterns.
Totem’s sensors scan the environment for changes in motion and sound, feeding this information to a spiking neural network; a system of software patterned after the operation of real biological neurons in the human brain. This neural network then influences the central rhythms and pulsing rate of the light. The installation thus moves through different states – from an unconscious state of dreaming that produces patterns that appear to us as random and noisy to a state of being awake where its patterns and rhythms are perceivable, entrancing and hypnotic. The actions of the installation thus evolve not solely from its human creators but from its own autonomous being based on interaction with its environment.
A totem is an object that represents a group or a tribe and is believed to possess supernatural powers. Increasingly, as we project supernatural powers and beliefs onto AI, Totem provokes us to ask how will live together with our technological others.
Photo Credit(s): Agustina Isidori