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2,500 people seeing themselves through the eyes of AI
Role
Concept, Interactive Development, On-site Operations
Team
Daan, Jimmy Nelson, &samhoud
Stack
Generative AI, Real-time, Tablet UI
Status
Shipped — SAIL Amsterdam 2025
Jimmy Nelson has spent thirty years photographing indigenous peoples around the world. The Huli of Papua New Guinea. Kazakh eagle hunters in Mongolia. People most of us will never meet, captured with a kind of dignity that shifts something in you. His work has always been asking roughly the same question. Can I make you recognise yourself in someone who looks nothing like you?
At SAIL Amsterdam 2025 we built an AI version of that question. Mirror of Humanity sat inside Jimmy's six-metre floating lighthouse Waves around the World, moored opposite the OBA on the IJ. On the outside: his analogue portraits of international crew members in traditional dress. On the inside: a digital mirror.
Mention faith and you'd appear in religious dress. Mention football and you'd be on a pitch in a kit. One answer, blown up into a stereotype.
Visitors answered a few short questions on a tablet. About their values, their interests, what mattered to them. Within seconds AI generated a first portrait. Then came the real question. Do you recognise yourself in this? Of the 2,500 people who went through it, 41% said the first image got them wrong. Sometimes slightly off. Sometimes completely off.
Then we let visitors talk back. They could give feedback on what was right, what was missing, what was wrong. The system generated a second portrait. The new image, side by side with the first, made bias visible and steerable in the same moment. People laughed. People got quiet. Sometimes both.
I co-conceived the concept and built the interactive layer. During SAIL itself I was on site tuning the whole thing live, because running generative AI for a public audience at a festival with 2.5 million visitors is its own kind of problem. Prompts behave differently at scale. Things break while people are queuing. You fix it and keep going. What stayed with me is something Jimmy talks about. That seeing others starts with seeing yourself first. The installation tried to make that literal. Most people didn't expect to feel anything. Then they did.
Themes
Generative AI
Image Generation
Prompt Engineering
React
TypeScript
Real-time
Tablet Kiosk
Public Installation
SAIL 2025
Live Operations
Concept Direction
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