SKY

A machine trained on the full spectrum of human opinion — speaking back to us about the world we are leaving behind.

Sky is an AI artwork that invites visitors into open conversation about climate change. There is no script. Visitors speak to Sky in natural language, and Sky responds. Drawing on the range of perspectives, anxieties, and hopes that humans have expressed about the climate. The work does not offer answers. It holds the breadth of what we already know and understand, and asks us to sit with it.

We needed an AI character that could speak knowledgeably about climate without pretending to be authoritative. The core of the system is a service-oriented architecture built around an API gateway called Captain, which routes each incoming message through a prioritised chain of language sources. Before a general language model is consulted, the query passes through a knowledge retrieval service built on TF-IDF vectorisation. A fast similarity search across a corpus of climate-focused articles scraped from the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), including their publications, technology assessments, and case studies. Relevant articles are surfaced and prepended to the language model context, grounding Sky’s responses in confirmed source material.

Wikipedia acts as a second retrieval layer, checking whether the query matches a known topic and pulling the relevant article when confidence exceeds a threshold. A text-to-speech engine converts the generated response to voice. A lightweight configuration service allows us to inject hardcoded responses for specific queries where precise language matters. Statements about particular facts or organisations that should not be left to generative variation.

The entire system runs as a set of containerised services. Captain handles session management, conversation history, and failover between sources, ensuring the artwork remains responsive even when individual services are slow or unavailable.

Shown at COP 26, United Nations, CTCN, Glasgow, Scotland (November 2021); COP 27, United Nations, CTCN, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (November 2022). Currently touring Australia, 2025–2027.

Made possible with grants from The United Nations & Danish Arts Foundation