Ultimate Services for your Happiness

Sci-Fi Book Inspired work for TRLab

TRLab very kindly asked me to be one of the featured artists for their AI2041 project, inspired by the book of the same name by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan.. The book is made up of different stories which asks questions about our relationship with AI together with an essay about the current state of the technology.

The work was inspired by the chapter "Isle of Happiness", telling the story of someone who is invited to a secret island to experience true happiness, driven by machine learning. I was particularly struck by the phrase "Ultimate Services for your Happiness" and thought about what might the inside of a machine look like as it tried to work out these services for your ultimate happiness.

The services in the book are driven by collecting all the available data on a person which exists in the public domain. With that in mind I created a script which downloaded thousands of images from Instagram with the hashtag #myhappylife. These images were then passed through an AI to create a latent walk-through to obfuscate and anonymise the data.

The final result is a 1/1 motion work together with sixty stills, each one unique, visually using the grammar of electronic circuitry together with a tension between the digital and the organic. I'm happy to say the work sold within a few minutes on the TRLab platform.