Burning Man Art (MIRA)

MIRA (Mega Intelligent Robot Artist) is an art piece by AI&I artgroup that we presented on Burning Man 2023-2025, as well as unSCruz 2024. Here I will show you the evolution of the project with some comments. You'll first see the art statement, then the result, the art MIRA created and some of my process images and notes. Let's start in 2023.

A couple of blog posts about MIRA:
https://alionakuznetsova.com/burning-man-2025/
https://alionakuznetsova.com/mira-2/

In 2023, AI art just became available through Midjourney, and the creation of it (and calling it art) brought about a lot of heated discussions. So our idea was two-fold - to gift the community the ability to play with AI art generation and to create a cute, very approachable robot artist to see if it would change people's perception (in fact, it did, greatly)

It was our first year on Playa, and we made a lot of rookie mistakes. For example, we had no idea how hard the Playa soil is and almost broke out anthena while trying to install. Also, of course, it was a MudMan year, so rain and mud broke the electronics at some point.

As for the textile part, I had this coat with hundreds of buttons that I once made for another shoot, and I decided to make small pockets for some of the buttons. We left small gifts in them, which took on a life of their own when people would replace what they took with something else. In addition, I decided I would make Japanese-style patches from the same textile for her pants. And of course, colorful yellow hair became MIRA's signature.

In 2024, we wanted to focus on a topic of belonging, trying to strike a balance between fitting into community and remainina authemntic. As first generation imigrants, we both had a lot to say on this topic.

From my part, I wanted to use classic knitting and embroidery techniques, but work with robotic materials like wire, found objects and microscemes. I also hid a lot of messages throughout MIRA's outfit, written in binary code. This time we also added a special diary which told MIRA's story, had detailed technical description for more ingeneering-minded people, and included some ink work in black and bronze metalic ink.

In 2024, over 1500 people have interacted with MIRA thoughout the event!

In 2025, we turned our focus from MIRA, to the audience. In previous years, many people asked MIRA to take their picture. So this time V. came up with and implemented a Magic Photo (see below) - stylized portrait with funny background. the trick was, MIRA would only take a photo if a viewer does something funny, so people had lots of fun bringing unexpected props, making faces, dancing and having a good time.

To match this new idea, from my side I worked with color and shapes to make MIRA look more funny and weird so people would feel at ease. I used colors found in the sunset in the desert and a lot of white to make her look light and flowing. I also played with knitted shapes and colorful artwork in the diary.

Interestingly, the AI landscape in general changed significantly. There were several AI art pieces now, and many were very impressive. What's next for AI&I project? You'll find out soon 😄