We Are the Whirled

Eli Diner endures the Divine Wrath of AI fireworks art at the Coliseum, courtesy of C(AI) Guo-Qiang.

By Eli DinerOctober 25, 2024

WE ARE: EXPLOSION EVENT FOR PST ART, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, September 15, 2024.

“This is a gift for Los Angeles,” said the voice over the loudspeaker. “Look to the sky.” We were looking already. Colorful plumes of smoke crowned the Coliseum. The voice belonged to Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang; the gift was one of his signature daytime fireworks displays. Its title was WE ARE. “The smoke is beautiful,” he explained, his face beatific on the Jumbotron. We were congregated on the field (officially the United Airlines Field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum), while shafts of bamboo rose in the stands, spewing sparkles and dust. Drones flew overhead. There were brief words in the sky, the sounds of battle, and heavenward ejaculations—organic and sustainable, we’d been assured. The show unfolded in five acts—one, I remember, was titled “Bird of Paradise,” another “Divine Wrath”—accompanied by a narration that was alternately casual and bombastic, very often hard to follow. The voice echoed around the football stadium, sometimes embellished with a digital stutter. It came not directly from Cai’s lungs but via AI producing a simultaneous translation in a Chinese-accented-English simulation of the artist’s human voice.

I believe we were meant to understand that AI had been responsible for other aspects of the pageant too. Maybe a robot chose the smoke colors. If I heard it right, the voice, at one point, told us to ponder whether the “logic of AI” was revealed in a particular sequence of little red explosions. “Or does it represent,” it asked, “the intricate, mysterious relationship between us and AI?” I said to the lady next to me, on the 30-yard line, that this might be a trick question. Her eyes stayed on her phone, which was recording everything, as she slid a little closer to her friends. One thing, however, I am confident about is that a human could never have written this phrase, which popped up on the Jumbotron: “The fierce heat emitting glistening holographic colors swathed upon their surroundings […] The colors represented transformation. It signified renewals and changes that we must experience to evolve.” A menacing mishmash of platitudes, the command to evolve: our artificial overlords in waiting seem to think—maybe with good cause—that we’ll be appeased by puffs of color.

Cai’s fireworks show was a kickoff for PST ART, a Getty initiative. Every five years or so, the well-heeled center on the hill rains down money to institutions around Southern California so that everyone, at the same time, can mount exhibitions linked by a common theme. With each iteration, the theme gets broader. This time around: “Art & Science Collide.” The pyrotechnics-meets-AI of Cai’s activation notwithstanding, it is climate, unsurprisingly, that dominates the science side of the collision. I won’t pretend that I’ve seen more than a fraction of these 70-plus shows, but I find that few things make art feel more impotent than when it attempts to grapple with the climate crisis. Collide seems like a uniquely inapt verb for what art and science here do to each other.

On the other hand, there were a few collisions at the fireworks display. Falling debris reportedly caused minor injuries and burnt garments. Some neighbors were freaked out by the noise. Épater le bourgeois, baby!

Across town, later that week, a yacht docked in Marina del Rey caught fire. For some reason, it was carrying a large supply of fireworks, which dazzled the harbor for more than an hour before the vessel finally sank.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.