Concept

Who Are You was a collaboration with contemporary artist Shantell Martin, transforming P3Studio at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas into an interactive lab exploring personal identity. The installation was organized around two complementary spaces — Record and Play — that together formed a living, growing archive of self-expression.

Martin is known for transforming everyday surfaces into striking graphic narratives, and her visual language of spontaneous ink drawing ran throughout the space, framing the experience as an extension of her ongoing inquiry into authenticity and self-knowledge.

Record

One area of the installation was dedicated to the act of recording. Guests contributed their own "Who Are You" story, bringing and leaving behind items that represent them — found or unwanted keys, a lock of hair, their location of birth, fingerprints, or "something very YOU." Guests could also sit down with Shantell to be interviewed and have their portrait drawn. And in the "Who Are You" booth, they could record their stories on camera, answering just that question. The booth wasn't some unoccupied recording station — it was activated by the artist and the context of her work about authenticity, making the act of self-disclosure feel like a genuine exchange rather than a performance.

Play

The other area was dedicated to Play — guests could view the curiosities and stories of others. Here, the recordings from the "Who Are You" booth were played back for visitors to watch and listen. "Through these stream of consciousness recordings, we are reminded of the inherent difficulty in truly being yourself when the world is so often telling you to be someone else."

The Play side turned the installation into a feedback loop: the more people contributed, the richer and more surprising the experience became for those who came after. Each visit was different because the archive was always growing.

Relevance

For a campus installation celebrating employee contributions to AI, Who Are You offers a model for how to collect and share personal narratives at scale. The core mechanic — a simple, direct question answered in a private booth, then shared publicly — could be adapted to surface the stories behind the research: what motivated someone to work on a particular problem, what surprised them, what they're proud of. The result is an installation that grows with the community it serves, where every contributor makes the experience richer for the next visitor.

All images courtesy of the artist, Shantell Martin.