Shadowplay 2026

Shadowplay is a direct, visceral encounter with generative AI as a creative material, something to explore with your body, through gesture, pose and touch. First shown at EMF 2024, it has changed and evolved significantly.

There are two ways to enjoy the work. You can use your body: step into the light and your shadow becomes part of a continuous, AI-generated image stream that reacts to how you move, letting you control the shape of the output images. Or you can use the touchscreen, which runs our custom software and gives intuitive, easy access to the real-time AI, letting you reshape the prompts driving the model as it runs.

At its core is a real-time generative model that produces around 22 images per second, projected onto the display surface as a living, interactive video that the audience continually reshapes. The piece deliberately blurs the line between creator, artist and audience, staging the shifts generative AI is bringing to creative culture (from making to prompting, from skill to orchestration, from originality to recombination) as something to play with rather than resolve.

It is an accessible, visually striking and thought-provoking playground that invites people to explore, experiment and perform.

Video of previous installations: https://vimeo.com/1184236994