The Laughing Room

The Laughing Room is an interactive art installation in which participants enter an artificially intelligent room, designed like a sitcom set, that plays a laugh track whenever the participants say something that the room’s algorithm deems to be worth laughing with.

The Laughing Room is connected to a machine learning algorithm trained on large dataset of audio transcripts of stand-up comedians. The algorithm will determine the patterns that precede laughter, and then react accordingly to the voices of the live participants.

Participants will spend time in the room learning how to “perform” to the room, and reacting to the emotional response that the room provides. The piece will also be recorded and live-streamed via video camera and audio to THE CONTROL ROOM, hosted in parallel at the MIT Libraries.

The project addresses the increasing social and cultural roles of responsive technologies in public and private spaces, users’ agency within and their dependence on these emerging emotional-social technologies, and the implicit questions of privacy involved in these systems.

The project is the creation of 2016-17 Berkman Klein Fellow Jonny Sun, and was incubated in metaLAB (at) Harvard, where Jonny has been a creative researcher since 2017. It's part of metaLAB's ongoing artistic exploration of the human dimensions of artificial intelligence.