Suchi Reddy installs voice-to-colour AI sculpture in Michigan Central

Architect Suchi Reddy has created an installation in a recently restored train station in Detroit that responds to the words spoken into microphones with colourful LED lights.

Me + You consists of a circle of modules with microphones surrounded by LED screens set up in the middle of the southern concourse of the Michigan Central, which was converted into offices by architecture studio Quinn Evans.

It is the first of the public art commissions planned for the space in the coming years.

Reddy, who leads New York architecture studio Reddymade, first showcased a similar installation in 2021 at the Smithsonian Museum.

With this iteration he wanted to make it to be more interactive, allowing users to walk through the array of machines.

"We exploded it and made it an internal experience," Reddy told Dezeen. "You can walk into it and walk through it. It's much more intimate."

Visitors to the installation are able to walk up to small modules in the centre of the installation. Each has a microphone that can be spoken into, and visitors are prompted to "give a word for the future".

The word is then processed through an AI language model trained on associations between words, colours and emotions and outputs an array of colour and flashing patterns, depending on the chosen word and tone.

The larger screens on the wall displays aggregates of all the different colours being displayed during a certain time period.

Reddy said that the exercise is meant to scrutinise the relationship between humans and technology and to show that humans have agency when it comes to interaction with machines, despite the "dystopic" undertones of much of contemporary technology.

"It's really about how humans evolve with technology," she said.

"If you can think about what control you can exert over that interaction, then you're the one in control, you're the one with the agency."

"And so part of the aim of the sculpture was really to think about how to give people agency – not just to empathize with themselves in their own vision of the future and everyone else's future – but to bring to life the idea that there is agency in the interaction."

Reddy also said that the back-lit tubes that extend out and away from the centre of the installation and the interfaces have an "organic" form, highlighting the co-evolutionary themes of the exhibition.

The future-oriented nature of the prompt was also meant to underline the revitalisation of the station, which had fallen into a state of ruin, as well as Detroit in general.

According to Reddy's team, of the 25,000 words that have been spoken into the machine since its opening in early June, the majority of words have been positive, with the most frequently spoken being "bright," "great," and "amazing".

Other projects by Reddymade include the interior design of Google's first retail location in New York City.

The photography is by John Marshall.

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