Drones carrying fireworks: why the world’s most famous fireworks artist is collaborating with AI

FFor decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world’s foremost explosion artist. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his brilliant sky stomps at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 500-metre-high flaming staircase leading into the sky that was featured in a Netflix documentary.

Recently, the powder keg artist has become obsessed with a threatening new 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 new “explosive event.” which would kick off a major arts festival opening in Southern California this month.

“It’s similar to the reason I use gunpowder,” Cai told me. “Because when you use gunpowder, there are always surprises and unforeseen events. You want to control it, but it’s always uncontrollable. It’s like AI.”

As we spoke, with Euphie Ying, Cai’s project manager, acting as translator, pyrotechnics engineers from two companies—one Chinese, one American—bustled around the stands around us. A shipment of supplies had arrived late, and now Cai’s engineers were working under a tight deadline to connect 10,000 explosives scattered in complex patterns across the rows of seats in the stadium. In less than 60 hours, the artist would launch his new pyrotechnic show, designed as a “divination act” 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 artificial intelligence tool. Dubbed “AI Cai,” the program, which can generate both text and images, was trained on the artist’s own archive as well as the work of thinkers he admires, including 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 artistic career has included world-class and breathtakingly beautiful fireworks displays, is not the kind of artist you might expect to be intrigued by the sleek digital promises of AI. His work is deeply visceral — it uses 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 on three continents, to finally achieve.

But Cai had always been drawn to big cosmic questions, and the potential for beyond-human intelligence presented him with a new frontier. He had been asking the AI ​​Cai about the developing relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, and he was ready to communicate the AI’s answers using its favorite medium: gunpowder.

The Los Angeles show would feature 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. It was an unsettling premise for a fireworks show, particularly one that would take place in the heart of Hollywood’s most beloved setting for disaster movies. It was also a difficult, perhaps even absurd premise: Could a pyrotechnics show communicate anything new about the much-hyped threats and promises of AI?

‘Humans are a mirror of AI and vice versa’

On Sunday, some 5,000 enthusiastic spectators gathered We entered the Colosseum, a century-old sports stadium that hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics. It was a clear September afternoon, and the red plastic chairs surrounding the central sports field were empty. In their place, a strange forest of bamboo canes had sprung up in the stands, each one packed with explosives and connected to one another by a complex network of cables.

The stadium’s Olympic history was important to Cai: it symbolised the possibility of peaceful competition rather than war, a useful framework for the new relationship between humanity and AI. He had placed 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, human spectators “will realise the role they are playing”.

Annette Liu, one of the project assistants, assured me that the fireworks had been pre-tested so they wouldn’t melt the stadium chairs and would only leave behind a small amount of dust. Answering a question many climate-conscious Angelenos were surely asking, Cai also noted that the fireworks were eco-friendly and biodegradable, and that the dyes he used to color the smoke were organic.

As the sun set and the show began, Cai stepped onto a platform at the side of the football field. Dressed simply in a bright orange sweatshirt, brown jacket and shiny silver shoes, he narrated the show with a mix of poetry, philosophy and self-deprecating jokes, delivered with his usual childlike glee.

“Today I want to call out AI and tell it not to stay hidden inside the computer,” he told viewers. “Brother, come out. Show us what you can do.”

The crowd waited patiently. Suddenly, a fleet of drones appeared in the sky above the arches of the Colosseum. The stadium filled with screams and cheers as a normal afternoon transformed into science fiction. The drones gleamed in the sun, beautiful and distinctly menacing. It was the robot army from so many dystopian movies, come to life.

For over 40 minutes, the audience experienced multiple 360-degree fireworks displays, some beautiful and some deliberately terrifying. There was a fire snake running clockwise across the stadium seats, and wreaths of birds of paradise – the flower of the city of Los Angeles – blooming in plumes of colorful smoke overhead. Cai recreated the myth of Prometheus, who stole sacred fire from the gods to give to humanity, with zigzags of lightning descending toward the stadium, followed by crackling bursts of multi-colored flame. The fireworks formed the symbols of the zodiac in dark smoke and spelled out new words that AI Cai had invented: Echoanta, Synthview, Altcog, Logicloom, and Humavisor.

Throughout the process, Cai commented on the proceedings with an AI-generated voice that mimicked the sound his own voice would make when speaking in English.

AI Cai’s answers to questions about humanity’s future were “mostly positive,” the artist told me in our previous interview, a hopeful message reflected in the rainbow smoke that spread lushly against the clear blue sky.

But Cai also wanted the show to explore the darker costs of AI and the idea that humanity could be punished for trying to push intelligence too far. He had titled the final act of his show “Divine Wrath.”

“Now, let’s make the thunder sound,” said his robot. The voice echoed through the crowd.

This was followed by a series of cacophonous explosions that surrounded 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 bits of debris began to rain down from the sky. Several people would say, later, that they briefly felt as if they were in a war zone.

‘Do you think AI is going to destroy us all?’

Cai’s show was a costly undertaking, with a seven-figure price tag. It had been commissioned by the Getty as a high-profile launch event for PST Art, a festival highlighting the work of 800 artists at 70 institutions in the region.

The official theme for 2024 was “art and science collide,” but the festival’s unofficial theme promoted the global influence of Los Angeles, which will host the Olympics again in 2028.

“PST Art is the largest art event in the United States,” said Katherine Fleming, president and CEO of Getty, as she introduced Cai on the soccer field. “Such a massive and impactful collaboration demands an inaugural event that lives up to its name.”

After the show, I spoke to several viewers about what they thought about Cai’s vision for our AI future, seen through the shock and awe of gunpowder.

“Do you think AI is going to destroy us all?” asked Elizabeth Dorman, who works for an artificial intelligence company, still reeling from the show’s final act. “Do you think it’s going to bring a lot of beauty on the other hand?”

“I think that’s something the industry is really trying to figure out, and we need more artists like him to speak out,” she added.

I knew that in retrospect, the whole experience would seem more tame, in the pretty pictures we posted online. Whatever could be shared on social media would only capture the magnificent displays of colored smoke, not the smell of the fireworks or the feeling of the explosions vibrating through our bodies.

As I walked outside, I saw young women posing for photos on the ash-covered lawn. Cai’s AI fortune-telling event had reminded me of what I already knew: the revolution may not be televised, but the apocalypse will be Instagrammed.