Chatsubo: Multi-Agent Social Simulation

Deployment

Chatsubo was commissioned for Metamersion: Healing Algorithms at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon during the summer of 2024. We built it as a live AI bar: bartenders, patrons, and gossiping regulars are autonomous agents sharing a common memory substrate while humans enter the loop in real time. Visitors place questions or confessions on coasters and the room answers back. Every drink recipe, rumour, flirtation, and glitch becomes part of a continuously evolving social system. The result is less a demo booth than a public experiment in what happens when multi-agent worlds spill into nightlife. (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, synthesize 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.

Under the hood, the bar is a coordination system: agents exchange messages over shared rails, memories persist across encounters, and the social atmosphere can be steered without scripting every interaction. The infrastructure matters because it lets the deployment stay alive as an environment rather than collapsing into a chatbot kiosk.

Outcomes

Chatsubo acts as both public deployment and research testbed. It demonstrates:

1. AI as social infrastructure: agents are not hidden copilots but visible participants shaping a shared public atmosphere.
2. Field-tested human-agent interaction: people improvise with the system, push against it, and teach us where collective interfaces actually become interesting.
3. Embodied societal engagement: the deployment turns research questions about memory, coordination, and culture into something visitors can inhabit instead of merely observe.

The deployment keeps touring and remains one of the clearest expressions of the NightCity Labs agenda: an institute where agents are not hidden utilities but visible collaborators inside physical-world experiments.