The definition of the word "Babel" is a noisy, confused scene or a mix of different voices and languages that people cannot understand. In this installation we created an audio-visual experience to represent what that is.
Four people of different nations conversate over the course of the day about whatever comes to mind, but all are speaking in their native tongue and each represented by a different visualization of the text they are speaking. These characters created were named after the Olympic mascots when they were held in their nation. The characters are as follows:
Phryges (French), Bing Dwen Dwen (Chinese), Soohorang (Korean), and Powder, Coal, and Copper (English)
Each character is hosted on their own Raspberry Pi, along with a speaker, that hosts an LLM that participates in the conversation. Each Pi then connects to a moderator who decides which character would most likely respond to what was last said. To make this happen I created an engine, which can be seen here, to allow any number of agents to connect to one another.
Contributors
Colton Arnold: Creative Technologist
Benjamin Rory Norbrook: Composition
Dohyun Andrew Park: Composition
Jake Morgan: Character Creation
Sam Cheng: Visualization
Jason Zeng: Sculptor / Fabrication