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As I walk up the stairs in a bank building filled with rooms covered in surrealist art, tunnels with lurking monsters called “leather horses,” and galleries of imaginary and real memorabilia, I find myself looking at an art mural across a vaulted ceiling that I can explore with the tools next to me. When speaking into the microphone, I see my words travel over the edges. My hand, inside a small room, is projected across the ceiling, highlighting parts of the mural. Suddenly, AI-generated descriptions appeared wherever I put my hand.
This is it Ministry of Dreada new installation experience in Philadelphia that I was lucky enough to visit before it opened, is a welcome dose of East Coast weirdness. Designed by Meg Saligman and over 100 other artists, this six-story space makes me think… Meow Wolf Or long-time LA weirdness Jurassic Technology Museum – Or even a very real London Sir John Soane’s Museum.
This “skin horse” lurks in the basement, if you look carefully enough.
The former bank building is now an immersive art gallery full of hands-on experiences to discover and a story too: letters in drawers, telephones that can be dialed or answered, and bathrooms that record your “deposits” with voice messages. Everything in Ministry is an exploration of the meaning of banking and the power associated with it. But what equally attracted me here was the idea of how to incorporate technology into a space like this.
Watch this: I saw the future of techno art in Philadelphia
Much like Meow Wolf’s explorations of layers of technology in art installations, something I talked about it at SXSW More recently, Ministry of Dread has been using small doses of artificial intelligence – nothing that generates or replaces artists’ work, but rather in a way that highlights and perhaps enhances. Ministry of Dread’s signature artwork on the fifth floor, The Heavens, is a giant mural by Saligman that is projected across sections of the ceiling. Angled seating allows visitors to loiter and stare, but many of the “gadgets” in the room let you play with the space too, created by the tech company Spatial pixel.
A full view of the room full of projectors where the sky mural is located, along with interaction tools. This is just one of many rooms in the ministry.
Spatial Pixel focuses on “spatial computing for spaces, not faces,” and was founded by Violet Whitney, former product manager and associate director of design at Google Sidewalk Labs, and William Martin, an architect and designer. They both also teach a course in spatial artificial intelligence at Columbia University.
Exploring artificial intelligence through art
The interaction tools for The Heavens and how they are designed to feel integrated and somewhat invisible are part of Whitney and Martin’s explorations of where artificial intelligence can work in more nuanced and space-aware ways. This fascinates me because AI, and smart glasses in particular, are already trying to solve this problem with very mixed success. What I’ve found is that art and entertainment can often be better places to explore AI ideas in specific ways, while setting intentional rules to respect the work and the art.
The Spatial Pixel team helped design the room in the room.
Whitney and Martin met Salligman in the same Philadelphia neighborhood, which is how they ended up collaborating on Ministry of Dread exhibitions. The Heavens experience is powered using Spatial Pixel’s open source platform, called Procession, which integrates multiple AI models into a system that operates in physical spaces. Whitney and Martin already have an interactive lab space for this in Columbia, but the Ministry of Dread is a public testbed, working on the 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 mural through the light. The main way we’re trying to allow visitors to interact with it is to capture the things they’re saying in the space,” Whitney said. “We want to take the things they say and change the mural based on their words and what they are referring to.”
The multi-level former bank building of the Ministry of Dread has several rooms inside, many of which are interactive, and have been designed differently by different artists.
Right now, a lot of wall interactions are simple and fleeting: my words disappear, my highlights fade away. But the Ministry of Dread is playing with the issue of banking with personal data, too. The software used to run the installation is programmable, so Spatial Pixel aims to continue evolving over time.
“Our goal is to ultimately record what people contribute, with the right consent. But then maybe those ideas become like this bank. It’s a bank, after all, to store these ideas, and then Meg can use them and review them and use them to develop the painting and the physical space. So it becomes this kind of constant dialogue with the muralist.”
It’s part of the thinking that Spatial Pixel wants artists to play with, rather than tech companies.
Words overlap with art, depending on how you react. The work changes quite a bit over time.
“What if you could actually talk to a painting? What if you could actually interact with a work of art and then explore it in new ways? We realized that having access to these tactile computing technologies, like the ability to recognize gestures, move things around — there are certainly a lot of academic groups discussing this, but it’s still not available to actual designers who want to make experiences in this way,” Martin said.
The idea Echoes experimental AI The art I saw in Austin at SXSW a few days after visiting Ministry of Dread—questions about agency and ownership, as boundaries are drawn between artificial intelligence and personal action. As I walked around the Ministry space with Meta smart glasses on my face, it got me thinking about how smart glasses — and most AI tools — currently take almost no consideration of this fine line.
But they will need to. Perhaps art spaces are the places where you can start thinking about this, without the need for glasses or personal wearable technology at all.