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UAE: AI-powered exhibition creates
A temporary exhibition has been opened at Jameel Arts Centre by a Chinese artist with the aim of spreading awareness about anxiety disorder. The installation has been set up to mark mental health awareness month in the UAE.
Multidisciplinary artist Samson Young installed the Reasonable Music exhibition that creates an interactive environment connecting sound with text and images using Artificial Intelligence.
The exhibition takes a technological approach to the philosophical ancient Chinese text of Daodejing dating the 4th century BCE. The artist aims to inspire visitors towards self-expression and deep absorption of the surrounding environment.
Speaking about the installation, Darn Ross, head of collections at Jameel Arts Centre, said that the Daoist thought reflected a turbulent era of war and violence. The artist uses computational analyses of the Daodejing’s formal features, filtered through human intuition, to invite visitors to interact with their space in a new perspective,
The first room shows a lone musician playing in a recording booth, performing a score composed by Young. The musician is using a glass harmonica, triangle, and detuned viola – instruments that were anciently perceived to be the causes of mental illnesses. On a speaker hung on the roof above the health of the visitor, calming music is being played.
“The meditative artistic space forms new teachings for times of great anxiety,” Ross said.
Importance of Self-expression
The main gallery is featuring 3D-printed sculptures which are connected in a closed-loop network. They respond to the changing light, sound and temperature levels. Furthermore, algorithms will monitor the number of people in the room at any given time to generate text or sound differently.
At one point, when any visitor screams into a sculpture for 10 seconds, a telephone hanging on the wall will begin to ring..
Ross further explained that the installation encourages people with anxiety to find a creative platform which will help them in expressing their emotions.
"The telephone ringing with a special music presents a form of award for self-expression,” added Ross.
The wall has a colourful digital screen reacting to sound. If there is loud enough clap, the digital display will reveal a combination of four words in total: plenty, love, peace, and truth. These names were given to the government ministries in George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
In addition, there is a alter-like room which has screens and speakers broadcasting animated text and sound from the English translation of Daodeijing.
“The sculptures are networked through AI, which not only reads the text, but isolates words from the text and reconfigures it on a screen,” Ross said.
She added that the networked objects listen to each other, sense the surrounding and communicate among themselves via embedded electronic components.
Young used such a splendid digital distortion to handle his own anxiety. Ross noted that in the process, he is encouraging viewers to break free of the prison of the mind.