The New Media Artspace proudly presents BETWEEN MEETINGS, a solo exhibition by ITP faculty member Sarah Rothberg that brings together for the first time three generations of Rothberg’s MEETINGS works, which together explore the technical and social evolution of meetings as spaces for interlocution and improvisation.
The premise of two characters’ coming together to interact through language has changed dramatically with the popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, dialogic interfaces for large language models (LLMs) that produce synthetic text in a conversational mode. BETWEEN MEETINGS shows how Rothberg’s works have steadily tracked this transformation from conversations between two humans, to conversations between humans and bots, to conversations between two AI agents. By emphasizing the spaces between these morphing meeting modalities, BETWEEN MEETINGS subtly modifies our commonsense understanding of how interfaces for social interaction constantly rebalance open improvisation and the deterministic constraints of scripted behavior.
Since 2021, Rothberg has recast her creative process apace with these agentic advances. Her MEETINGS encompass software development, multi-player virtual reality (VR), animation, and live and mediated performance. All are exhibited at the New Media Artspace in video form, with SCRAMBLED ZONE running as live software in the in-person exhibition. The exhibition also incorporates contextualizing artifacts from Rothberg’s process such as code she wrote to define the AI agents’ personalities, email invitations she sent to participants in the VR performances, and portraits of her AI-invented avatar, Sophie.
Learn more about the exhibition and the public artist lecture on November 11th.