me + you
INSTALLATION ARCHITECTURE
me + you
Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, Washington, D.C.
On View: November 20, 2021 – July 6, 2022
me + you, created by globally renowned artist and architect Suchi Reddy, is a site-specific artificial intelligence (AI) and light sculpture that blends physics, neuroscience, and data technology with the human voice. Created for the Arts and Industries Building’s (AIB) expansive central rotunda for FUTURES, the Smithsonian’s first major exploration of the future, visitors could activate the two-story installation by speaking their “future vision” into its cloud base. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) machine learning algorithm translated meaning, tone, and sentiment into a unique kinetic mandala of color and light. Each visitor’s “future vision” flowed into a central totem to create an awe-inspiring monument made up of the collective future visions of the visitors themselves.
The blending of responsive light, color, and AI was groundbreaking in a public artwork. As AIB’s Special Projects Curator, Helen Bechtel brought together AWS partners with Suchi Reddy to debut the technology company’s first-ever major contemporary art commission. A team of AWS engineers worked closely with Reddy and independent curator, Isolde Brielmaier, for more than 1200 hours over two years to custom-create machine learning and cloud technology infrastructure. me + you went on to open at the Michigan Central Detroit Train Station, capturing and reflecting the future visions of more than 1 million visitors to date.
Bechtel developed the early conceptual framework for the rotunda installation, envisioned as the central visitor hub for FUTURES. She guided AWS in selecting their first independent curator and served as the central organizing force throughout the process of choosing an artist and shaping the installation’s foundational vision, ensuring it resonated with both the setting and the broader exhibition.
About the Artist
Suchi Reddy, fellow of The American Institute of Architects (AIA), is an architect, designer, and artist based in NYC. In 2002, she founded Reddymade, which focuses on public art installations, large-scale commercial spaces, and residential projects ranging from single-family homes to interiors and prefab architecture. Guided by her mantra “form follows feeling,” Reddy’s architectural and artistic practice is informed by her research on neuroaesthetics, which examines the impact our environments have on the brain and body.
Reddymade’s most celebrated projects include:
- The first flagship Google retail space in New York, achieving a LEED Platinum certification
- me + you, an interactive AI and light sculpture displayed at Michigan Central Station in Detroit from June – December 2024, and first unveiled in 2021 at the Smithsonian in D.C. for the FUTURES exhibit
- A minimalist home in Salt Point, New York, with artist Ai Weiwei
- LOOK HERE, a solo exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
- X, a temporary sculpture in the center of Times Square
- A Space For Being, a collaboration with Google, Johns Hopkins, and Muuto during Salone del Mobile measuring the impacts of neuroaesthetics
- An award-winning hybrid prefab home in Los Angeles
- The Connective Project in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, featuring 7,000 yellow pinwheels carrying messages and images from the surrounding communities
Artist’s Statement
me + you engages with the idea that technology is wisdom, and that it is our human interaction with this wisdom that brings it into beauty and balance. Weaving the imprint of humans and the intelligence of technology together in a totemic textile, me + you creates an enduring cultural artifact of collective balance that is a positive emblem for a future of co-evolution.
me + you speaks to our imperative as humans to envision our relationship with technology as a positive dialogue. It creates a visceral, immediate and human connection to technology, one that instigates a feeling of wonder as we encounter our feelings mirrored to us via the sculptural apparatus. The concept of the textile and central “loom” are drawn from the jacquard loom, the precursor to the computer. Connecting ancient knowledge and artificial intelligence through machine learning, me + you weaves a new beautiful wisdom.
Photo by Farrah Skeiky
Photo by Alyssa Schukar
Photo by Albert Ting