Visitors to a former church in the Italian city of Spoleto will encounter a mirror that uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition to build an otherworldly image of themselves.
Italian design studio Ultravioletto created the Neural Mirror installation to give audiences a chance to contemplate the controversial technologies in an artistic setting.

"Artificial intelligence extracts all of our behaviours in a shady way then transforms them into a form of wealth for corporations," Ultravioletto's art director Bruno Capezzuoli told Dezeen.
"Here this process is well declared and explained to the user. They can see in real time what kind of data we are capturing."

Presented with the Carla Fendi Foundation, the Neural Mirror is installed at the former Church of Santa Maria della Manna d'Oro as part of the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, that takes place in the Umbrian town until 14 July.
The three-dimensional Neural Mirror portrait has shades of the psychedelic imagery created by Google's famous artificial neural network.
Like those images, its idiosyncrasies are the product of the AI, which Ultravioletto wanted to use as a co-creator rather than a mere tool. The program decides in what shapes and colours to compose the image, based on the captured data.

Next to the screens, a machine writes out the data it has gathered as it sees it with a pen onto massive rolls of paper. It presents the data as strings of JSON code ? a simple data-interchange lan...