BETWEEN MEETINGS Puts Two Offline Chatbots in Endless Debate

The anchor of Sarah Rothberg: BETWEEN MEETINGS is FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE (2025), live software in which two LLM-driven avatars hold a conversation that never ends. Each is handed an opposing persona (selfish and selfless, maximalist and neat, mother and daughter, monogamous and "not exactly"), a style of talking and a question (like whether it is OK to not hold the elevator), and every three minutes the software reshuffles all three. The agents run offline on local llama3.2 models, which keeps them frozen, in curator Katherine Behar's phrase, "like a time-capsule of the moment in which they were trained." The two figures are black-and-white and ghostly, stumbling against a black void filled with their own transcript.

Rothberg, who teaches in NYU's ITP and IMA programs, has been staging conversations through interfaces since 2021, and the show gathers three generations of the MEETINGS series in reverse order. NEW MEETINGS (2021) were VR performances with roughly 30 guests whose voices were disguised so Rothberg could not tell who was on the other end; Just the Agreements collects the ground rules each pair drafted before they began. The SUPERPROMPT works (2023) brought in Sophie, an avatar that sometimes ran on ChatGPT, alongside a human-to-human session with the new media artist Nina Sobell. A second FOREVER MEETINGS variation, "is AI worth it?", locks two bots into that one argument.

Behar curated the exhibition. The browser version, which visitors scroll down through while gallery visitors climb up through the same sequence, was built by the New Media Artspace student docent team led by gallery manager Maya Hilbert, and Rothberg called it "so fun and playful" in the announcement. Rothberg gives a free public lecture on Nov. 11.