From Kanye West’s iconic mountain to the multi-screened portal into the soul of Adele, Devlin has been behind some of the most renowned stage designs. Her work goes further than that too. As a creator of performative spaces, she designed The Singing Tree for the V&A Museum in London.
The tree was part of an annual experiential celebration of Christmas where Devlin used machine learning to collect thousands of words from the public. All the contributions were combined and processed by an algorithm trained on 25 million words of 19th century poetry.
The result was a constantly regenerating carol that is complemented by an interactive choir of human and synthesised voices in what Devlin called “an invitation for our machines to sing along with us”. It was viewed by over ten million visitors during Christmas 2017.
Devlin and her team of algorithm creators, sound and video designers are no strangers to Artificial Intelligence and mass audiences: Her luminous fluorescent red Fifth Lion sculpture roared A.I. generated collective poetry to crowds in Trafalgar Square during London Design Festival