The Oracle of Spirit Lake

CREATIVE DIRECTION // PERFORMANCE // ART DIRECTION // AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION

Hulaween is the premier Halloween festival in the US, and this year I wanted to make the scariest costume I possibly could for our ~20,000 guests. I'm Justin Bolognino, and for the past three years, I've been the Creative Director of the immersive world at the heart of Hula, Spirit Lake, which is arguably the most deeply human creative endeavor I've ever had the responsibility to direct. With over four hundred of the most incredible people coming together with, as our Creative producer Rüts so eloquently says, with "soft hearts and rough hands" to build the ultimate "trick or treat" imaginable. Every type of builder, maker, doer, and lover, using every form of tool imaginable to deliver miracles that could only come through this collective creative human intelligence. Call it… Superintelligence.

Delightful confusion, if at times scary, was the goal. In this age of insular algorithmic bubbles, delivering ideas that may challenge your worldview is one of the best services I can provide as an artist. At the heart of Spirit Lake, the lake show features an immersive audio-visual spectacle projected onto a giant water mist screen at the center of the lake. This year, I made three hours' worth of swirling psychedelia unique only to the sacred land of the Spirit of Suwannee.

My dream over the past three years doing the show has been to take this insane linear show to the next level by making it participatory and interactive with our beloved audience. But… how? While working with Young & Sick on the art, he sent over this wild-looking multi-faced, single-eyed creature as an art option, and I was immediately struck with inspiration: this thing would be the Oracle of Spirit Lake.

What if we could make the Oracle fully interactive, like the Oracle of Delphi, where guests could ask the Oracle a question and get an answer they may or may not seek. Without a doubt, AI is the most divisive topic of our time, especially when it comes to creativity and art, and doubly especially for our very human-centric audience. What then is the scariest possible Halloween costume I could come up with? What if the ultimate trick of this Halloween treat was to fool people into thinking we made a giant, holographic, real-time AI system that could answer questions in real time?

What if we could effectively spoof AI with the ultimate satire in the trippiest setting possible? The Oracle of Spirit Lake is part Pythia, Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greek lore, part HAL 9000, but all… Wizard of Oz. I put together an analog guitar effects pedal board that I manipulated with knobs in real time while answering questions. I tapped Moe "Lightbrush" Angelo to create over a dozen animated facial expressions across the emotional spectrum—and yes, he used some generative tools to augment the process. We then assigned each emotional Oracle Eye-face to a MIDI keyboard, labeled with a corresponding symbol, that I could trigger to give the massive, hovering, multidimensional holographic eyeball emotive, real-time expression.