RichieBot: A Modern Legacy

CLIENT

The Department of Growth

ROLE

Art Director/Exhibition Curator

WHO IS PIKE MVMT?

**We can now remember someone through AI, but should we?**

Overview

This project began with training AI on tens of thousands of pages of writing, business philosophy, sales training, voice recordings, and video from J. Richard Dema, an entrepreneur, entertainment producer, marketer, and the late father of Department of Growth founder, Brian Dema.

The idea is not to bring him back, but to use film, data science, psychology and art to understand how a person’s ideas and creative legacy can be recombined and accessed in a new way.

We are testing our work to see how close the bot has come to the man (in terms of psychological profile, personality and memory), and capturing peoples' reactions to it to understand how this process makes us feel.

Objectives:

To help his son - and the world - explore Richard’s ideas
In a way that looks like, sounds like, and speaks like Richard
Test how close the bot comes to the man
Study how we react to AI used in this way

The Exhibition

Not only technically ambitious, but extremely precious.

This project was not only an exploration of the potential of evolving tech, but a cathartic release of the client’s experience with his late father’s belongings. The client not only fed the technology with his father’s archive of business papers, childhood photos, and personal memories, but he fed this archive to be used in art. The client tasked me and three other artists, Khytul Abyad, Ben Bernthal, and Bronze Swallow, with repurposing Richie’s thousands of archival pages into new art pieces.

Later, I assumed the role of directing this exhibition, from securing a gallery space, to coordinating with artists across multiple states, designing the flow of the work and information, printing decals, framing photos, and arranging the original pages with care and dignity.