the porous fabric structure that she’s struggling to stretch onto the exoskeleton of her installation piece, which is suspended in the airy atrium of building 99 on Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus.
Momentarily defeated, she pauses and looks up.
“It’s going to be gorgeous,” she says.
“It” is a glowing, translucent and ethereal pavilion that Sabin and her Microsoft collaborators describe as both a research tool and a glimpse into a future in which architecture and artificial intelligence merge.
“To my knowledge, this installation is the first architectural structure to be driven by artificial intelligence in real time,” said Sabin, principal designer at Jenny Sabin Studio in Ithaca, New York, who designed and built the pavilion as part of Microsoft’s Artist in Residence program.
The two-story structure, made of 3D printed nodes, fiberglass rods and fabric digitally knit with photoluminescent yarn, uses AI to translate anonymized data about facial expressions, noise, voice tones and language into a choreographed dance of color and light.
By using art and architecture to visualize information collected by microphones and cameras placed at different locations in the building, Microsoft designers and researchers hope to stimulate thinking about AI in our lives through interactive architecture.
“Artistry, creativity and humanity play an important role in technical innovation,” said Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft’s research organization and chair of the company’s Aether Committee, which focuses on the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies, including issues around sensitive uses of AI, biases and fairness of AI systems, and human-AI interaction and collaboration.
The Artist in Residence program, he explained, was set up to invite artists to explore ideas at the intersection of art and computer science with Microsoft’s researchers and engineers and, more generally, “to stimulate joyful creation and out-of-the-box thinking across our organization.”
“Jenny’s creation,” he added, “is an embodiment of possibilities, expectations and anxieties about the rising influences of machine learning and pattern recognition technologies that are permeating the world in interesting, beautiful – and at the same time potentially invasive and concerning – ways.”
