I walk up the stairs in a bank building full of rooms filled with surrealist art, corridors with hideous animals called “skin horses” and displays of memorabilia and originals, I find myself looking at a graffiti on the ceiling that I can’t inspect with the instruments next to me. Speaking into the microphone, I see my words skimming the edges. My hands, thrown into the small room, are visible on the ceiling, highlighting parts of the mural. Suddenly, AI-generated descriptions appear where I’ve placed my hands.
This is the Department of Fear, a new installation experience in Philadelphia that I was lucky enough to visit before it opened, and it’s a welcome East Coast measure of weirdness. Created by Meg Saligman and over 100 other artists, the six-story space makes me think Wolf Wolf or the longtime LA oddity the Museum of Jurassic Technology — or even the real Sir John Soane Museum in London.
This “leather horse” sits on the ground, if you look hard enough.
The former bank building is now an intensive art gallery full of more information to be solved and a story too: messages in drawers, phones that can be dialed or answered, toilets that record your “deposit” with audio messages. Everything in the Department is to examine the definition of banks and the powers associated with them. But what drew me here was the idea of how technology would fold into a space like this.
Watch this: I Saw the Future of Tech Art in Philly
Like Meow Wolf’s exploration of the layers of technology in artist installation, something I talked about at SXSW recently, Ministry of Awe plays small doses of AI — nothing that produces or replaces the work of artists but in a way that highlights and potentially enhances it. The fifth floor’s signature artwork, The Heavens, is a large mural by Saligman that is featured throughout the ceiling segments. Angled chairs allow guests to hang and look up, but several “bells” in the room allow you to play with space, too, created by the technology company Spatial Pixel.
A full view of the room full of projectors where the painting of the heavens is, as well as interactive instruments. This is just one room of many in the Ministry.
Spatial Pixel focuses on “spatial computing of spaces, not faces,” and was founded by Violet Whitney, former product director and design director at Google Sidewalk Labs, and William Martin, an architect and designer. Both also teach Spatial AI courses at Columbia University.
Exploring AI creatively
The Heavens interaction tools and how they are designed to feel integrated and somewhat invisible are part of Whitney and Martin’s exploration of how AI can work in subtle ways to sense space. This makes me happy because AI, especially smart glasses, are already trying to solve this with very mixed success. What I’ve found is that art and entertainment are often better places to test AI ideas in contained ways, with deliberate rules to respect the work and art.
The Spatial Pixel team in the room they helped design.
Whitney and Martin met Saligman in the same Philadelphia area, which is how they ended up working together on Department of Awe shows. Heavens information is implemented using Spatial Pixel’s open source platform, called Procession, which integrates multiple AI models into a system that operates on virtual environments. Whitney and Martin already have a collaborative lab space at Columbia, but the Department of Awe is a community lab, working on art they want to keep sacred.
“A lot of what we’ve been doing is finding ways to change the mural, or the way you see the painting in light. The main way we’ve been trying to allow visitors to interact with it is to pick up things they say in the space,” Whitney said. “We want to take the things they say and change the picture based on their words and what they point to.”
The former bank building of the Ministry of Awe has many rooms inside, many of which are interactive, and designed differently by different artists.
Right now, most interactions on the wall are simple and fleeting: My words disappear, my highlights fade. But Ministry of Awe plays with the theme of banking on personal data, too. And the software used to run the installation is programmable, so Spatial Pixel aims to keep evolving over time.
“Our goal in the end is to record what people contribute, with the right permission. But then maybe those ideas become like this bank. The bank, after all, is to store these ideas, and then Meg can use them and revise them and use them to change the painting and the visual space. And so it becomes this kind of endless dialogue with the artist,” said Martin.
It’s part of the thinking Spatial Pixel wants artists to play with, unlike tech companies.
Words cover it with art, depending on how you share it. Work changes slowly over time.
“What if you could really talk to the painting? What if you could really interact with the artwork and explore it in new ways? We realized,” said Martin, “that access to these physical computing techniques, like being able to recognize gestures, move things around – certainly there are a lot of academic groups discussing this, but it’s still not really accessible to make real designers who want to do real things.”
The concept echoed the experimental AI the art I saw in Austin at SXSW a few days after my visit to Department of Warning — questions about agency and identity, where the boundaries between AI and personal work are drawn. And as I watched the Ministry site with Meta’s smart glasses on my face, it made me think that smart glasses — and many AI tools — are currently completely unimaginable along this critical line.
But they will need to. And maybe art spaces are places to start thinking about it, without glasses or wearable technology needed at all.
