Es Devlin

Es Devlin (born 1971 in London) is the defining stage designer of her era, creating monumental kinetic sets for Beyoncé, U2, Adele, Kanye West, the Super Bowl halftime show, Olympic ceremonies, and operas across the world’s great houses — work that has made her a fine artist in her own right, with a 2023 retrospective at the Cooper Hewitt.

Poetry with machines

Devlin has worked with AI since 2016. POEMPORTRAITS — conceived with Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine and built with creative technologist Ross Goodwin and Google Arts & Culture, launching publicly in 2019 — invited each participant to donate a word, which an algorithm trained on some 20 million words of 19th-century poetry wove into an original two-line poem projected across the donor’s portrait.

She scaled the idea to a national stage in 2021 as designer of the UK Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai — the first woman to design a UK World Expo pavilion. Her “Poem Pavilion” used AI to co-author poems with visitors and displayed them across the building’s 20-metre circular facade. She has continued to explore machine intelligence in works and talks since, urging audiences to become literate in the algorithms already shaping them.

Devlin’s embrace is a thinking one: she describes informing herself before forming opinions, and frames AI collaboration as a meeting point to be negotiated — advising POEMPORTRAITS users to reject the algorithm’s first offer “until you reach a meeting point between your sensibilities and those of the algorithm.”