The me + you sculpture is powered by custom software, all hosted locally on 8 computers embedded in the sculpture. All 3rd-party software tools are free and open source. The sculpture consists of 5 visitor stations with a microphone and distance sensor. When visitors get close to a station, the microphone turns on and listens for a specific trigger phrase: “My future looks ____”. When this phrase is detected, the word that the visitor spoke will be stored and run through an LLM to calculate sentiment and a set of colors that are associated with the word. The colors are then used to animate the “mandala” lights at the station as a custom response to the visitors input word. At the same time, the colors and sentiment of their word are sent to the 3 large LED screens behind the sculpture, which responds to the collective” responses of all visitors, and shows the most common colors and sentiments that have been spoken to the sculpture.
