Marco Perego: The Being

In Marco Perego's The Being, a neural network trained to generate speculative faces is pushed far beyond its limits, endlessly attempting to create a coherent human face on a large LED wall. The system is never quite allowed to succeed, producing instead a continuous hallucinatory stream of near-faces. Custom furniture in the space quietly measures visitors' breath and heart rates, feeding their presence back into the output.

I came onboard as Technical Director across two distinct phases: a research period through late 2023 and into 2024, followed by a full production phase culminating in a showing at Centre Pompidou-Metz in early 2025, and subsequently at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles in early 2026.

During research, I evaluated a range of non-contact biometric sensors to identify the right approach for capturing live audience presence without disrupting the experience. I then worked closely with the exhibition designer and sound engineer to design the custom furniture that would house the final sensors and subwoofer transducers, integrated into forms that felt like part of the artwork rather than technology.

The final installation is controlled by a custom TouchDesigner patch for the visuals and a Max patch for the audio, each acting as a control layer modulating the respective generative AI producing the visuals and audio in realtime, tuning the output in response to user presence and sensor data.