Diemut Strebe: The Prayer

The Prayer is presented in the show “Neurons, Simulated Intelligence”, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Camille Lenglois from 26 February - 26 April 2020. The Prayer is an art-installation that tries to explore the supernatural through artificial intelligence with a long-term experimental set up. A robot - installation operates a talking mouth, that is part of a computer system, creating and voicing prayers, that are generated in every very moment by the self-learning system itself, exploring ‘the divine’ the supernatural or ‘the noumenal’ as the mystery of ‘the unknown’, using deep learning. How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between humans and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and allows a speculative stance on the future of humans in the age of AI technology and AGI ambitions. Above an anticipation of AI Singing with AI generated texts, since singing is a major religious practice. Diemut Strebe, Author of Concept and Final Design The production is a collaboration with Regina Barzilay, Tianxiao Shen, Enrico Santus, all MIT CSAIL, Amazon Polly, Bill and Will Sturgeon, Elchanan Mossel, MIT, Stefan Strauss, Chris Fitch, Brian Kane, Keith Welsh, Webster University, Matthew Azevedo. With extraordinary and special thanks to Hideyuki Sawada, Waseda University and Thanh Vo, The University of Danang, whose speech machine for the hearing impaired has been a point of departure for the design of the outer features of the artwork.