is a body of work made in 2023 about conversation in the evolving landscape of spatial computing and artificial intelligence. SUPERPROMPT takes form as custom software (built using unity, web technologies, large language models, and VR) used to produce livestreamed avatar performances, interactive installation, and video.
Central to SUPERPROMPT is an avatar that is sometimes inhabited by me, sometimes by anonymous guests (as an extension of the work NEW MEETINGS), and sometimes by a conversational large language model (which I named “Sophie” after a conversation in which ChatGPT had hallucinated a performance I had done for the Whitney 2019 biennial by the same name).
In a series of performances called MEETINGS, these different inhabitations of the avatar (me, guest, and the LLM Sophie) are put in conversation with each other (me and a guest, me and Sophie, or Sophie and Sophie). MEETINGS are livestreamed as as 2d animations as they occur in real-time.
Framed to the audience and participants as "open-ended meetings about whatever", these performances attend to conversation itself as creative material, inspired by emergent conversational frameworks like community agreements, Bohm Dialogues and Non-Violent Communication.
Keeping the material of conversation central, the first installation of this body of work, which took place at bitforms gallery in Summer 2023, focussed on the act of shaping Sophie's conversational style through "superprompts," - bits of instructional texts appended to prompts for Sophie that would dictate Sophie’s apparent “personality”. My hope was to draw attention to the emerging trend of conversation-as-interface with tools like ChatGPT. Conversations between me and Sophie would culminate in new iterations of Sophie superprompts, with instructions including things like "speak like a Valley girl from 2005" and "you are a docent at an art show." These were then put into the software system as iterations of Sophies that could be conversed with, both by Sarah, as well as by visitors to the installation.
More info here:
Credits
Bibliography
bitforms catalogue (including works for sale)
