Gaze to the Stars: AI and Public Art from Personal Affect and Collective Empathy

Behnaz Farahi, Sergio Mutis, Yaluo Wang, Suwan Kim, Chenyue "xdd44" Dai, Haolei Zhang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 Creative AI pre-proceedings (NeurIPS 2025) Creative AI

BibTeX download is not available in the pre-proceeding

Gaze to the Stars is an AI-mediated participatory public art installation that transforms the MIT Great Dome into a platform for collective emotional storytelling. 200 Participants engage in reflective conversations with a large language model, their responses encoded as Braille into their iris videos and projected onto the Dome. Using affective narrative embedding, iris segmentation, and emotional clustering, the project visualizes both shared and personal affect. Through Gaze to the Stars, we frame AI not as a tool for efficiency, but as a companion—inviting self-reflection and fostering civic empathy within public space.