Einstein Ghostphone

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 in my ongoing series of installations that invite viewers to have a conversation with some of the historical figures who fascinate me most. A telephone makes an absent person feel close: a voice arrives at your ear, addresses you, and waits for your reply. With Einstein, that intimacy opens questions about curiosity, authority, and how we use the things we invent. As we speak with a machine in the voice of someone we trust, what do we believe—and what should we question?