For decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world’s foremost fine artist of explosions. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his glowing footsteps in the sky at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 1,650-foot flaming ladder to heaven featured in a Netflix documentary.
Recently, the gunpowder artist has become obsessed with a new threatening technology: artificial intelligence.
AI “brings me more anxiety, but also, freshness”, the 66-year-old Chinese artist told me last week at the historic Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, where he was preparing for his newest “explosion event”, which would be the kickoff of a major arts festival opening in southern California this month.
“It’s similar to why I use gunpowder,” Cai told me. “Because using gunpowder, there’s always surprise and unexpectedness. You want to control it, but then it’s always uncontrollable. It’s just like AI.”
As we talked, with Cai’s project manager Euphie Ying translating, pyrotechnics engineers from two companies – one Chinese and one American – were moving busily through the stands around us. A shipment of supplies had arrived late, and now Cai’s engineers were working on a very tight deadline to wire together 10,000 explosives scattered in complex patterns throughout the stadium’s rows of seats. In less than 60 hours, the artist would be launching his new pyrotechnics display, designed as an “act of divination” to answer the question: what is the fate of humanity and AI?
The Los Angeles show was designed “in collaboration” with Cai’s new custom-built artificial intelligence tool. Dubbed “AI Cai”, the program, which can output both text and images, was trained on the artist’s own archive, as well as the work of thinkers he admires such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein and Ptolemy, allowing Cai to converse with a new intellectual partner he described as a less “politically correct” version of ChatGPT.
The human Cai, whose 40-year art career has included fireworks shows of global significance and stunning beauty, is not the kind of artist you might expect to be intrigued by the slick digital promises of AI. His work is deeply visceral – using the sound and smell of fireworks, not just their dazzling light – and requires intense technical logistics. Sky Ladder took him more than two decades, with attempts across three continents, to finally achieve.
But Cai has always been attracted to vast cosmic questions, and the potential of more-than-human intelligence presented him with a new frontier. He had been asking AI Cai about the unfolding relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, and was poised to communicate the AI’s answers using his favorite medium: gunpowder.
The Los Angeles performance would include a fleet of 2,300 drones carrying fireworks – a first for him, Cai said, since the Federal Aviation Authority had only recently allowed certain drones to carry explosives. This was an unsettling premise for a fireworks show, particularly one staged in the heart of Hollywood’s most beloved setting for disaster films. It was also a difficult, perhaps even an absurd one: could a pyrotechnics show communicate something new about the much-hyped threats and promises of AI?
‘Humans are a mirror of AI and vice versa’
On Sunday, roughly 5,000 excited spectators filed into the Coliseum, a century-old sports stadium that hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics. It was a clear September afternoon, and the red plastic chairs that surrounded its central sports field were empty. Instead, a strange grove of bamboo poles had sprung up in the stands, each dry stick budded with explosives and connected to each other by a complex network of wires.
The stadium’s Olympic history was important to Cai: it symbolized the possibility of peaceful competition in place of war, a useful framing for the new relationship between humanity and AI. He had placed the spectators on the field, rather than in the seats, as a deliberate reversal: “Humans are a mirror of AI and vice versa,” he said. By standing on the field, the human spectators “will realize the role they are playing”.
Annette Liu, one of the project assistants, reassured me that the fireworks had been previously tested so as not to melt the stadium chairs, and would leave behind only a smattering of dust. Answering a question many climate conscious Angelenos were sure to be asking, Cai also pointed out that the fireworks were environmentally friendly and biodegradable, and that the dyes he used to color the smoke were organic.
As the sun inched lower and the show began, Cai mounted a platform at one side of the football field. Dressed simply in a bright orange hoodie, brown jacket and gleaming silver shoes, he narrated the show with a mix of poetry, philosophy and self-deprecating jokes, delivered with his typical childlike glee.
“Today, I want to call AI out, telling it not to keep hiding inside the computer,” he told spectators. “Bro, come out. Show us what you can do.”
The crowd waited patiently. Suddenly, a fleet of drones appeared in the sky above the Coliseum’s arches. Gasps and cheers filled the stadium as an ordinary afternoon lurched into the realm of science fiction. The drones glittered in the sun, beautiful and distinctly threatening. This was the robot army of so many dystopian films, come to life.
For his show at the LA Coliseum, Cai Guo-Qiang made fireworks in the shape of a Bird of Paradise, the city Flower of Los Angeles. (: Igor Grbesic) pic.twitter.com/yF79HG8Row
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) September 20, 2024
Over more than 40 minutes, the audience experienced multiple 360-degree fireworks displays, some gorgeous and some deliberately terrifying. There was a snake of fire that raced clockwise through the stadium seats, and wreaths of birds of paradise, the city flower of Los Angeles, blooming in plumes of colored smoke overhead. Cai re-enacted the myth of Prometheus, who stole the sacred fire of the gods to give to humanity, with zigzags of lightning descending towards the stadium, followed by crackling explosions of multicolored flame. Fireworks formed the symbols of the zodiac in dark smoke, and spelled out new words that AI Cai had invented: Echoanta. Synthview. Altcog. Logicloom. Humavisor.
Throughout, Cai commented on the proceedings in an echoing, AI-generated voice, which mimicked what his own voice would sound like speaking English.
The responses that AI Cai had given to questions about the future of humanity were “mostly positive”, the artist told me in our earlier interview, a hopeful message that was reflected in the rainbow smoke fanning out luxuriantly against the clear blue sky.
But Cai also wanted the show to explore the darker costs of AI, and the idea humanity could be punished for trying to advance intelligence too far. He had titled the last act of his show “Divine Wrath”.
“Now, let’s bring out the thunder,” his robot voice boomed over the crowd.
This was followed by a series of cacophonous explosions that circled the stadium, invoking the thunder of the gods. The impact of each blast was so intense that I fell to my knees and tried to cover my head. The sound wasn’t just in my ears: it was everywhere. Ash and pieces of debris started to rain down from the sky. Multiple people would say, later, that they had briefly felt as if they were in a war zone.
‘Does he think AI is going to destroy us all?’
Cai’s show was an expensive endeavor, with a seven-figure price tag. It had been commissioned by the Getty as a high-profile launch event for PST Art, a festival that highlights the work of 800 artists across 70 institutions in the region.
The official theme for 2024 was “art and science collide”, but the unofficial theme of the festival was touting the global influence of Los Angeles, which will host the Olympics again in 2028.
“PST Art is the biggest art event in the United States,” said Katherine Fleming, Getty president and CEO, as she introduced Cai on the football field. “A collaboration that is this enormous, this impactful, it demands an opening event to match.”
After the show, I spoke with several spectators about what they made of Cai’s take on our AI future, as seen through the shock and awe of gunpowder.
“Does he think AI is going to destroy us all?” Elizabeth Dorman, who works for an artificial intelligence company, asked, still rattled by the show’s final act. “Does he think that, on the other hand, it’s going to bring a lot of beauty?
“I think that’s something the industry is really trying to figure out, and we need more artists like him to comment,” she added.
I knew that the whole experience would look tamer in retrospect, in the pretty photographs that we posted online. What could be shared on social media would capture only the gorgeous colored-smoke displays – not the smell of fireworks, or the feeling of explosions vibrating through our bodies.
As I walked out, I saw young women posing for photographs on the ash-covered turf. Cai’s AI divination event had reminded me of what I already knew: the revolution may not be televised, but the apocalypse will be Instagrammed.