Einstein Ghostphone

The red 1950s payphone of the Einstein Ghostphone on a whitewashed brick wall at the LOOP Art Center

Call Albert Einstein

What would you ask Albert Einstein—and what might he ask you in return?

I was commissioned by Georgia Tech and received an ElevenLabs AI Scholar Grant to create the “Albert Einstein Ghostphone,” an interactive installation to be placed at the lobby entrance to the new LOOP Art Center. You will pick up an antique 1950s payphone and talk to an ElevenLabs model of the great physicist and humanitarian himself.

My imagined Einstein is warm, curious, quietly humorous, and still full of unfinished questions about the universe. His memories end at his death in 1955, and let me tell you, he has questions about what we’ve been doing with the knowledge he left for us since then. You may find yourself discussing physics, music, democracy, nuclear war, civil rights, the ethics of historical visualization using AI clones, or any of the other responsibilities that come with great and dangerous knowledge.

The Einstein Ghostphone is one of my ongoing series of antique telephones hacked with Arduino and AI voice models, inviting the public to have a conversation with some of the historical figures who fascinate me most. A voice in your ear talks to you and is curious to hear how you grapple with their legacy. With Einstein, that intimacy invites questions about the responsibility of dangerous inventions like atomic physics and AI itself. When you talk to a machine claiming to be the voice of someone you trust, what do you believe, and what should you question?

Mary Hambidge Ghostphone

I was commissioned by the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts to turn their founder American craft pioneer Mary Hambidge’s own antique phone into a ghostphone. Part of the permanent installed collection of the Hambidge artist residency, visitors can pick up the phone in Mary’s old weaving shed and hear the story of the founding of this important center of Appalachian folk art and contemporary artmaking.