in_between.final.2.toe

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1X6cU3QrKv5smy5eTbV7TbS43H1gnSNMxpFIhnsWguuU/edit?slide=id.g3ad41a2cd66_0_1#slide=id.g3ad41a2cd66_0_1

"In Between is an interactive installation that transforms spoken locations into AI-generated landscapes, inviting users to physically reach in and distort the digital memory with their hands.”

Project Description

"In Between" is an interactive projection-mapping installation that investigates the permeable boundary between physical environments and their algorithmic reinterpretations. At its core, the project asks: "How does our memory of a place change when it is re-imagined by an algorithm and dissolved by our own touch?” "Where is the boundary between a real location and its digital ghost?” The work invites participants into a dynamic dialogue with technology, demonstrating how digital systems can re-author our understanding of the real world.

The work invites participants to speak a simple prompt—“show me [location]”—which becomes the catalyst for transforming a real-world site into a speculative, semi-fictional landscape generated through AI. Using a combination of speech recognition, natural-language parsing, and Runway’s text-to-image synthesis, the system produces a reimagined visual rendering of the requested location, emphasizing distortion, virtuality, and the malleability of urban space under computational vision.

"In Between" challenges the notion of AI as a neutral tool. Instead, it positions generative systems as active interpreters, capable of amplifying, distorting, and re-authoring the world we know. The project is designed to provoke a sense of uncanny familiarity: participants recognize the location yet find it strangely alien, then witness their own bodies actively shaping its unstable digital form. This intuitive, gestural engagement bypasses traditional interfaces, placing the audience simultaneously inside and outside the generated environment. By transforming everyday places into unstable, hybrid environments, "In Between" offers a powerful reflection on how technology reshapes our presence, our perception, and ultimately, our understanding of what constitutes "real" and "place."

Inspiration

• Core Concept: Liminal Space
  • My primary inspiration is the anthropological concept of "Liminality" (from the Latin limen, meaning "threshold"). In architecture and anthropology, this refers to transition spaces—hallways, waiting rooms, or stairwells—that are neither "here" nor "there."
  • I became interested by how Generative AI is creating a new digital liminal space. When an AI generates an image of a city, it creates a "ghost" of a place. It looks familiar, but the details are dissolving or shifting. It exists in a transition state between a photograph (reality) and a hallucination (fiction).
  • The project title, "In Between," is a direct reference to this state. I wanted to build an installation where the user stands physically in the gallery, but visually inhabits this unstable, transitional dimension.

Process