TEMPO - City of Austin

Public art grant to build a digital installation

TK
  • Role Lead UI/UX designer and artist
  • My focus Generative art, natural language processing, LED installation
  • Client City of Austin
  • Time 4 months

The Project

Commissioned by the City of Austin through a 2022-23 TEMPO grant, Reconnected was a year-long digital art installation displayed 24/7 in a street-facing window at the Austin Central Library—a civic centerpiece of downtown Austin. Designed to be visible from the public sidewalk at all hours, the piece offered a quiet, poetic counterpoint to the loneliness and isolation of the pandemic. We used thousands of crowd-sourced data about people’s current experience with the pandemic and then re-stitched their entries together using custom machine learning algorithms that matched sentiment and syntax together to create beautiful, collective poems written by 3-5 strangers from anywhere in the country.

TK
TK

My Role

As Creative Director, I led the concept and execution of this generative work, which transformed the library’s window into a space for shared reflection. I designed and engineered the content and hardware, as well as physically installed it myself (a three day event). We engineered the exhibit - a 48-screen LED set to run and create poems 24/7. It was visible at all times, even in mid-day sun. The project ran for 1 year.