28-9 June 2025, AI Can't Write Symphonies and Neither Can You, The Boardwalk, Glasgow, UK
Morphological Murmurations engages its audience kinaesthetically with language and draws on the flocking behaviour of birds to broaden consideration of how AI conceptualises language and the roles it might play in both facilitating and limiting thought and expression. Utilising a depth camera, game engine software, Deep Reinforcement Learning and voice cloning Text to Speech, the installation places visitors within a virtual 3d representation of the embedding space of a Large Language Model (LLM) where a flock of artificial agents responds to their movements, visually and sonically activating words through a synthetic clone of the artist’s voice. This is language, not assembled through rational logic, but through patterns of bodies working together: that of the visitor and those of the flock. Through the intuition of movement, muscle memory and spatial awareness, the visitor explores the space of an ‘other mind’ (the LLM) through the way other minds (birds) communicate and coordinate movement with their bodies.
This instantiation of the work was created in response to a provocation from the Scottish AI Alliance for the event AI Can’t Write Symphonies and Neither Can You, inspired from a scene in the 2004 film I, Robot, in which Will Smith’s character asks the robot Sonny ‘can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?’ When Sonny replies ‘can you?’ the implication is of course, ‘no’, and that judging any individual’s ability against such extraordinary accomplishments is unfair. Smith’s question holds up symphonies and masterpiece paintings as exemplars of humanity’s ability to creatively express oneself. This installation proposes they are artefacts of something more essential to what it means to be human: the ability to experience and shape thought and expression through movement and embodied interactions with others in both physical and conceptual space. It opens the ‘black box’ of an LLM to transparently immerse visitors within it, highlighting differences between human minds and algorithmic models. At the same, it promotes a more inclusive consideration of and engagement with other ways of thinking, communicating and creating.
The work was inspired by conversations with Jane McKie and Stuart King after I had intuitively written “trust pets” during an exercise at a Writing the Wrongs of AI workshop run by Pip Thornton. Jane, a poet, and I both have a fascination with Starling murmurations and the way meaning emerges in language. Stuart, a mathematician, is particularly interested in fluid dynamical processes. Pip’s workshops drew together writers, artists, academics and other experts to consider ways to ‘reclaim human agency in an age of AI.’
Technologies: Orbbec Astra camera, Nuitrack skeletal tracking, Unity, ML Agents (PyTorch), Coqui Text to Speech, Google BERT, Python