Lower East Side, New York
Sarah Rothberg
Forever Meetings
BitformsBitforms gallery is pleased to present Forever Meetings, Sarah Rothberg's second exhibition with the gallery and debut New York solo exhibition. Forever Meetings continues Rothberg's research on the dynamics of conversation and large language models, culminating in a new body of generative artwork from which the exhibition gets its name. Within each work a custom software program prompts two AI agents, embodied as avatars, to have infinite, never-repeating conversations. The artist pairs opposing personas, for example, instructing one avatar to "role play as someone very selfish", and the other as "always selfless". Their discussions evolve as they exchange viewpoints on questions written by the artist. Select prompts center around morality, ownership, power, and relationships—subjects selected by Rothberg as a study on dichotomies that exist in her own life. Forever Meetings allows both the artist and the audience to observe the tendencies and patterns of AI models. This exhibition is produced in collaboration with Yotam Mann (AI System Engineer), Marpi (Animation System and Unity Developer), Nailah Hunter (Original Soundscape), and Claire Hentschker (Frame Sparkle Engineer) and Han Zhang (Production Assistant). Sarah Rothberg (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York, NY. Rothberg creates playful, poetic, usually-a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationship to the world around you. These take many forms ranging from interactive installation, to performance, video, writing, workshops, and experiments with technology. The artist’s experiences exist in a variety of contexts: at galleries, museums, festivals, on google docs, at the consumer electronics expo, screens in the NYC Subway system, zoom calls, secret twitter accounts, or MoMA. Some hosts have included: bitforms gallery, rhizome, NRW-forum, MTA Arts, Sotheby’s S2, CultureHub, Gray Area Foundation, Apple stores around the world. The artist is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Rothberg is on the full-time faculty at NYU (interactive media at ITP), a member of ONX Studio, and a mentor/former-member at New Inc. Rothberg is also part of collaboratives: More&More Unlimited, which facilitates workshops for imagining changed worlds, and Is This Thing On? a post-web2 experiment in artist-driven livestreaming.