Mechanical Mind Echoes the World

A machine taking the pulse of a planet.

Mechanical Mind Echoes the World was created for the United Nations General Assembly and brings together data from UN SDG reports, the World Health Organisation, and Our World in Data’s SDG tracker. Visitors encounter a work that moves between the scale of global statistics and the texture of machine-generated imagery. A reflection of collective progress, and collective failure, on climate and health.

The two visual components of the work are browser-based applications, with a parameter animation layer controlling visual behaviour over time. One component uses real-time audio analysis. Breaking an audio signal into frequency bands and mapping energy levels to the rotation, scale, weight, and opacity of a geometric form rendered in 3D. The second visualises sentence embeddings as a navigable three-dimensional point cloud: statements about AI and the future were encoded using a sentence transformer model, reduced to three dimensions, and clustered. Each point in the space represents a sentence; cluster membership determines its colour.

Created in close collaboration with the United Nations and Wellcome’s Cultural Partnerships team. Shown at the United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Headquarters, New York, September 2023.