KEYSTONE I II III IV



Keystone I, II, III, IV - Rudolfo Quintas

Audiovisual Sculptures, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon 2019

Keystone I, II, III, IV are four new-media sculptures that confront the viewer with objective analysis by an AI entity of the way Portuguese society writes online. The artwork presents this information by re-creating the network of complex interactions, translations and endless feedback between the digital and the non-digital.

Over a period of three months, the artist and his team trained the AI entity to be capable of reading and speaking about what it has experienced. This system, inspired by the neural networks of the human brain, has collected, analysed and evaluated the sentiment of more than 100,000 tweets from the most followed Twitter accounts in Portugal (politicians, newspapers, political parties, etc.). The Keystones construct both a short and long-term memory data universe of the most emotionally charged words of each day and speak about them, basing their interpretations strictly on what they have learnt on Twitter.

- Rudolfo Quintas


Cloud visualisation done with OpenFrameworks following research conducted on the representation of both long and short term memory. Python was used to interact with a mongoDB database. Raspbery Pi's were used to power the display of content generated by the AI.

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Concept & Creation: Rudolfo Quintas
Audiovisual Programming: Joan Sandoval
AI Data Science: David Rau
3D Assistante: Julia Triches
Production Assistant: César Fortes
Production: Challenge Silence