Between This and That is It is an interactive installation, an automated consensus machine embodied in an electronic office typewriter from the 1980s, a Brother CE-50, powered by an offline language model. A visitor types two words, however far apart, and the machine completes the line with a third, the word that lies, for the model hidden inside it, halfway between the other two. At a time when public debate keeps breaking into opposing camps, this simple act offers a quiet gesture of mediation, a compromise reached without negotiation and printed on paper, between art and AI is modern, between language and model is example. The title of the work is one such line.

... and yet the middle word it finds is never neutral. It is measured in a space of meaning learned from the texts of the web, with all the habits, clichés and prejudices they carry, so that each balance it proposes also shows where the scales were tilted long before anyone sat down to type. Line by line the sheet fills with such statements, sometimes precise, sometimes absurd, and the title of the work is one of them. The machine offers no resolution, and leaves its visitors with the compromise on the page and the question of whose middle it is.

between language and model is example

Language models arrange words in a vast space of meaning, where every word holds a position and the distance between two positions stands for how closely the model relates them. These positions are learned from enormous amounts of text gathered mainly from the web, and with them the model inherits the habits, clichés, biases and beliefs of that text. The typewriter offers a single way into this space, the search for a middle, and through this constraint the audience can sense its shape, its gaps and its prejudices, one pair of words at a time.

between edge and embodiment is sense

Far from the endless conversation of today's chat interfaces, the exchange here is short, mechanical and printed on paper. Once typed, the answer remains on the sheet as a record of the encounter, next to the words of the visitors before. The model runs offline on a small computer (RPi Zero) installed inside the typewriter, without any connection to the Internet. What remains is a haiku-like poetic co-authorship between the visitor, the typewriter and the language model, where several decades of automated text production, from the electronic office to machine learning, are folded into one gesture of typing.

Exhibitions

beyond_repair art & research collective

Antoni Rayzhekov and Martin Murer are interdisciplinary artists and researchers working at the intersection of music, interaction design, and creative technology. Together, they form the art and research collective beyond_repair, exploring new relationships between everyday objects, hybrid instruments, and artistic expression. Combining perspectives from experimental music, human-computer interaction, and design research, they investigate how everyday materials can become expressive interfaces. Their work aims to contribute equally to artistic practice and academic research.