UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Generates Poems Using Artificial Intellegence

British artists and designer Es Devlin revealed a pavilion that uses Artificial Intelligence and the visitors’ contributions to send poems from Expo 2020 Dubai to space! 

The cross-laminated timber pavilion represents the UK in the grand event Expo 2020 Dubai that will open next week. The designer aimed to create a structure that conveys the identity of Britain as a diverse cultural nation and shows what comes out of the collaboration of all these notions integrated with technology. 

“A sense of Britain as a place that’s open, welcoming, questioning, uncertain, contradictory, inconsistent, fallible, sometimes nonsensical, majestic, comical, beautiful, and accessible to all,” -Es Devlin 

To achieve this aim, the designer used advanced machine learning algorithms to transform the visitors’ input into collective poems. These poems are displayed on the illuminating facade, turning the pavilion’s exterior structure into an exhibit.

The process through which visitors contribute their inputs to the poems includes inviting them to donate a word at the “mouthpiece” upon entering the central space of the pavilion. The mouthpiece displays the inputs in English and Arabic, alongside a choral soundscape. After that, an algorithm turns the randomly donated words into texts and generates a collective poem every minute. 

“The idea draws directly on one of Stephen Hawking’s final projects: “Breakthrough Message”, a global competition that Hawking and his colleagues conceived in 2015 inviting people worldwide to consider what message we would communicate to express ourselves as a planet, should we one day encounter other advanced civilizations in space.” -Es Devlin

“What if the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 becomes a place where visitors from all over the world take part in a collective global project that showcases British expertise in AI technologies and poetry while transcending national identities?”

The UK Pavilion in Expo 2020 Dubai is not Es Devlin’s first experience with machine-generated poetry. The artist is known for her passion for large-scale installations that merge music, language, and light, and she first explore this AI-generated poetry back in 2016 with the Poem Portraits project at the Serpentine GALLERY, which theme was proposing a social sculpture. 

“Algorithms are among us, they are an ever-growing part of our culture, their output is based on what they are trained on and who trains them. The pavilion is at once an expression of the ideal of a culturally diverse Britain that I grew up with, tempered with our growing awareness of the part algorithms play in shaping the future of our culture.” – Es Devlin.

The manufacturing and construction of the Expo 2020’s UK Pavilion themselves show diverse cultures: the cross-laminated timber is made from wood sourced sustainably from Italian and Austrian forests; the LED elements that illuminate the poems are designed in Belgium and produced in China, and the algorithm of the system was developed in California. 

The pavilion was designed with structural engineer Atelier One, environmental design consultant Atelier Ten, executive architect Veretec and creative agency Avantgarde.

Expo 2020 Dubai will run from October 1st, 2020 till March 31st, 2022, under the theme “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future”. It is the first World Expo to take place in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (MEASA). It is almost ready to celebrate all kinds of human achievements and inspire the next generation to achieve more.

The Expo 2020 features several big names in the architecture and construction industries besides Grimshaw Architects. The masterplan for the event is created by HOK, while Santiago Calatrava created two designs for the Expo, an innovative pavilion for Qatar and a futuristic one for the UAE.  And more recently, Grimshaw Architects designed the Sustainability Pavilion which conveys a notion of the impact of human activities on the environment.