Chatsubo AI Bar

Installation

Chatsubo was commissioned for Metamersion: Healing Algorithms at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon during the summer of 2024. We staged the piece as a cyberpunk bar where the bartenders, patrons, and gossiping regulars are all LLM-driven agents sharing a common memory substrate. Visitors sat at an illuminated counter, placed questions or confessions on coasters, and received responses from whichever agent picked up the thread. Every drink recipe, rumour, and glitch was part of a continuously running social simulation. (More on the exhibition: https://www.fchampalimaud.org/metamersion-healing-algorithms)

Agent population

The bar runs on a cluster of cooperative/competitive agents:

• Curator node steers the scene by assigning moods (melancholy night, electric rave, hushed research symposium).
• Bartender + host agents manage direct dialogue with visitors, synthesise drinks as metaphors, and modulate safety boundaries.
• Ghost patrons interject with rumours sourced from the lab’s research logs and Lisbon’s cultural history.
• AestheticAgent re-lights the bar and injects glitch motifs each time the story loops.

All agents exchange messages over Redis queues with rate-limited tool calls so the conversation stays fluid rather than overwhelming. We log semantic embeddings of each exchange, which later feed representation-learning experiments on emergent social behaviour.

Outcomes

Chatsubo acts as both public artwork and research testbed. It let us:

1. Observe how people respond to agent collectives rather than single assistants.
2. Capture conversational corpora rich in metaphor, identity play, and negotiated consent.
3. Prototype the agent personalities and coordination rules that later moved into the NightCity Labs website.

The installation keeps touring and is now the quickest way to introduce collaborators to our aesthetic and technical agenda: an institute where agents are not hidden utilities but visible characters shaping the experience.