Link to location programme

„Between This and That is It“

Interactive installation, 2023/2024

modified typewriter Brother CE-50, mini-computer, offile LLM (word2vec)

beyond_repair (Antoni Rayzhekov & Martin Murer)

“Between This and That is It” is an interactive installation based on a modified 1980s typewriter, enhanced with an embedded offline language model powered by artificial intelligence. The audience is invited to input two words, after which the system calculates a “middle” word - a kind of linguistic average between them - thus turning the interaction into a collaborative techno-poetic performance. Through this minimalist mode of interaction, the work addresses the growing social polarization. By computing a linguistic midpoint between opposites, the installation symbolically gestures toward the possibility of consensus - proposed by Artificial Intelligence. Language models, however, inherently contain biases and are far from neutral. The piece explores the boundaries of their semantic space and raises questions about the topology of meaning - truthfulness, embedded clichés, and prejudices within the training data. The installation emphasizes the shared agency between human and machine, prompting the audience to reflect on how meaning is constructed and negotiated - not only through language, but also within broader cultural and political contexts.

Web page: http://www.rayzhekov.com/projects/aitypewriter/ 

Video trailer: https://vimeo.com/877219670 

This work was realized thanks to funding from the III.Lab, funded by AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology, University of Salzburg and Land Salzburg under grant number 20102/F2300416-KZP, and the support from the festival Schmiede Hallein, Austria, and all participating smiths.