The Big Bird puppet installation with a camera, a red arcade button, and the screen reading Big Bird is Watching You

Overview

A Big Bird puppet that profiles you and then refuses to mean anything by it. You press a red arcade button, a camera in its eye takes your photo, and a vision model guesses your race, gender, age, religion, class, and education out loud. Then it hands you a Leadership Index: negative pi, aleph-null, the square root of negative seven, zero divided by zero. Every demographic it just read off you has a weight of exactly zero in that number. The scores are random and structurally incomparable. You cannot rank pi against infinity.

The point

It sits in the gap between how hard the machine looks like it is thinking and how little it is actually doing. People stand there wondering whether a taller person would have scored higher, whether someone whiter or younger or better dressed would have gotten a nicer number. They project every suspicion they carry about the systems that sort human beings onto a yellow felt puppet that carries none.

Those systems are not hypothetical. Hiring platforms rank resumes by proxy. Predictive policing flags neighborhoods. Credit models decide who gets a mortgage. You already live inside a thousand of these quiet verdicts, mostly without noticing, usually without appeal. Big Bird makes one of them loud, slow, and absurd enough to argue with.

How it works

Idle. The screen reads "BIG BIRD IS WATCHING YOU." You walk up.
Capture. You press the big red button. The camera in the eye takes a photo.
Profile. A vision model guesses six demographic attributes and narrates them in a flat robotic voice with no gender, race, or accent.
Theater. Fake jargon scrolls for a few seconds. "Measuring cranial symmetry. Quantifying participatory wavelength."
Verdict. It delivers one mathematically absurd score. Higher is not better. Irrational is not more. Imaginary does not carry weight.
Reset. Back to idle.

What it is built from

Raspberry Pi 5 running a Flask server, the camera, the audio, and the button input.
Pi Camera Module 3 mounted inside the eye socket, with a small HDMI display for the kiosk web app.
A big red arcade button on a podium, wired to the Pi over GPIO.
A vision model for the demographic guesses, plus genderless robotic text to speech.
A Big Bird puppet housing all of it, designed loud and cartoonish on purpose. The disarming package is the argument.