MIRA (our Burning Man sculpture from 2024)

Who Is MIRA?

MIRA (Mega Intelligent Robot Artist) is an art installation by the AI&I art collective, which visited

Playa in 2023 and 2024. It’s a human-sized statue of the robot with a screen for a face. It communicates with a viewer through various means, such as facial expressions, emojis, art, and custom gifts. MIRA’s appearance is very sweet, featuring retro clothes and numerous handmade knits and embroideries.

In 2023, as AI-art was just emerging, the topic of MIRA’s work was the versatility of her art and the human-likeness of her expression. In 2024, as AI art became commonplace, MIRA’s focus shifted to preserving her identity while trying to blend in among humans. We also added a layer of game-like quests for people to solve, as it appeared that was what viewers wanted most in 2023.

The focus of this brief article will be on the interactions of MIRA'24.

Main Points

Overall, the reaction of our viewers was very positive. The majority spoke to her in a delighted and energized manner, using words that showed curiosity and compassion. We think it’s because of MIRA’s quite childish appearance and overall friendly tone of communication.

Nevertheless, many asked MIRA if she is going to take over the world and proposed an alliance with her in this case :)

Most of our viewers’ time, though, was spent trying to understand what MIRA actually does. She is not a loud piece and will interact only if the viewers initiate interaction. The complexity of the interaction, as well as the reward, would also depend on the time and attention the viewer invests in the dialogue.

On top of that, sometimes some of her actions also failed, leaving the viewer frustrated, but willing to start over or come back. A good example of it is if there were no paper in the printer and the generated art wouldn’t print, it would be lost forever, as she never generates things exactly the same way.

As a result, we estimate that around 1,500 people talked to Mira throughout the week, with at least 8.5% being returning visitors. A lot more people were just taking pictures of her or waving.

Statistics

Interaction progress

73% of people noticed that MIRA is an interactive piece, not just a statue
58% of people started the dialogue and understood that MIRA’s emojis are her way of communicating back
35% of people successfully prompted MIRA to generate art
11% of people decided and were able to get the art printed
6% figured out that MIRA had an analysis mode and could explain herself verbally on the screen
Only 1% of people were able to follow numerous clues that we included in the 2024 design based on the feedback from the previous year.

Interaction duration

Below is the histogram of MIRA’s interaction durations.

The correlation between the duration and interaction rating is 0.31, suggesting that the longer the interaction, the more meaningful it was; however, other factors also affected interaction quality.

Day vs Night

As MIRA had a screen with a certain maximum brightness, and since day- and nighttime experiences on the playa are very different, we wanted to run some comparisons between our day and nighttime statistics.

As we see, even though MIRA saw more people during the day and they stayed with her longer, they had more successful interactions at night.

*Astonishingly higher printing success rate is explained by the fact that we brought in new cartridges around sunset

**Some of the clues were better seen in daylight

Beginning vs End

Let’s now examine the same statistics comparing the beginning of Burning Man week to its end. We know there are more artists present at the beginning, and more visitors by the time the Man burns.

Topics and attitudes

As this year’s topic was about MIRA’s identity and inclusion in Playa culture, let’s see how people would react to her. We run a script that generates keywords from the communication transcript on a sample of our data (around 20%). That’s what we came up with:

Here are attitudes toward the art MIRA generated - almost all positive:

As for attitudes towards AI in general, we can see more negative words, perhaps reflecting the anxiety many people feel about AI replacing humans or being used in an exploitative manner:

Finally, what topics did our visitors discuss with MIRA? When meeting an AI-powered art-generating robot statue in the Playa desert, they chose to converse about:

What would you talk about? Let us know in 2025!