SooA Kim: Looking Outwards – 02

I saw this installation by Google PAIR’s project in the AI: More than Human exhibition at the Barbican Centre in UK over the summer. Waterfall of Meaning is based on generative machine learning system that translates sentences to create a “map” of word meanings. It shows how a machine absorbs human associations between words and analyze them into categories by using the algorithms. I remember putting a word “theater” into the machine and the word travelled from the top of the installation in a style of word embedding where you can also see all the other words that associates with “theater.” As the word travelled down, it went through different level of categories in certain direction where the machine identifies which category the word belongs in. (i.e. good vs bad, human vs machine, female vs male)