The Neural Mirror installation creates an AI-based reflection of viewers
Ultravioletto developed an AI installation where visitors are the artwork. Or at least some information decoded from the very visitors
Developed by Italian based studio Ultravioletto, the Neural Mirror presents a virtual and analog reflection, as interpreted by Artificial Intelligence – AI. It is a two-part installation that took place in the summer of 2019 in the former Church of Santa Maria della Manna d’Oro, in the city of Spoleto, in central Italy.
Promoted by the Carla Fendi Foundation, Ultravioletto’s AI installation is a multidisciplinary creative project which merges design with contemporary narrative and emerging technologies.
The first experience visitors got was an ordinary mirror: an embedded facial recognition technology scanned the visitor’s image to transform it into data then converted into an AI-generated interpretation of the person.
Colored clouds of dots were displayed on an OLED screen, hidden behind the mirror.
The facial recognition software processed the visitor likely age, sex, and emotional state to interpret them through and display the result on the screen.
According to Ultravioletto, the Neural Mirror AI installation represents the type of data that large corporations and governments collect through our devices. The installation is a real-time representation of this phenomenon from the information age.
The second part of the installation uses the same data collected to print lines of code into a giant roll of paper.
This very personal data from each visitor was now displayed as an unreadable sequence of digits for the viewer to attribute any type of interpretation.
“In conclusion, the whole experience should be analyzed as a data stream that flows between me and my analog reflection,” says Bruno Capezzuoli, art director of Ultravioletto.
