On 18th September we unveiled Please Feed the Lions, a major public artwork powered by machine learning in London’s iconic Trafalgar Square by superstar designer Es Devlin - a landmark commission for London Design Festival.

The artwork combined design, poetry and AI (an algorithm trained on 19th century poetry), capturing public imagination and drawing a constant crowd; with over 6000 poems generated onsite, more than one new unique interaction every minute.

The project follows an 18 month long collaboration between Es Devlin, Google Arts & Culture Lab and creative technologist Ross Goodwin, as part of the Artist and Machine Intelligence Program at Google Arts & Culture. The collaboration began with the creation of PoemPortraits for the Serpentine Summer Party 2017; an artwork that marked the first project to come out of the Google Arts & Culture Arts and Machine Learning summit which took place at the Lab in November 2016.

Feed the Lions shows how powerful the encounter of arts and technology (AI) in the public space can be.

The installation is unique in that it is both beautifully complex and incredibly interactive and accessible. It stemmed from a desire to bring an iconic heritage landmark to life. As Es Devlin explained: “British design guru, Sir John Sorrell nudged me as we walked through Trafalgar Square this time last year and said: 'Landseer never wanted those lions to look so passive: he proposed a much more animated stance, but Queen Victoria found it too shocking.' The thought lodged in my mind. What if we could invest the lion with a diversely crowd-sourced single collective poetic voice?".

Feed the Lions was commissioned by London Design Festival as their landmark commission, and conceived and executed by Es Devlin. GA&C was lead producing & technical partner.

A global team of coders, designers, sound engineers and artists got together to bring the lion to life. The build of the replica at 1:1 scale was tasked to Stage One. They scanned one of the real lions using LiDAR, which was then cut out of 16 35kg foam blocks and pieced together. It was then sculpted and smoothed along the gradients of the body before a hard coat was applied. A final topcoat of red was applied in two layers to give it the distinctive colour.

Res.Lab created the Lion's roars and Luke Halls Studio designed an evolving projection to bring it to life with 19th century inspired poetry made of the words submitted each day and re-arranged by our AI.

This installation marked a milestone for GA&C: It was our first public installation of this scale and positioned us at the cutting edge of art + tech. The artwork combined design, poetry and AI, capturing public imagination and drawing a constant crowd.

- Live interaction:

>1 interaction (word submitted) every minute for 5 days.

- Press impact worldwide:

> 164 press hits

> a total reach of 426M

> an AVE of £4.3M

> “It is a work that pushes at the edges of design and machine intelligence” Financial Times.

> “a unique project that sees history, digital design and public art merge in Trafalgar Square.” Wallpaper.

- Social impact

> 65M reach on Twitter and 83M on Instagram.