  MIT wanted to commission a large scale artwork that would serve to
'illuminate a new campus gateway, inaugurate a space of exchange between MIT
and Cambridge, and inspire our students, faculty, visitors, and the surrounding
community to engage with art in new ways and to have art be part of their daily
lives.' Among other things, the art was to reflect the fact that scientific
discovery is often the result of many individual contributions, both
acknowledged and unacknowledged. In this work, a group of computer scientists
collaborated with a conceptual artist to produce a collective signature, or a
signature learned from contributions of an entire community. After collecting
signatures from two communities -- the university, and the surrounding city --
the computer scientists developed generative models and a human-in-the-loop
feedback process to work with the artist create an original signature-like
structure representative of each community. These signatures are now
large-scale steel, LED and neon light sculptures that appear to sign two new
buildings in Cambridge, MA.
