R&C @CAC Project · Exhibition | LLMscape

Chronus Art Center (CAC) is pleased to present the first outcome exhibition of the Research & Creation (R&C) @CAC Project, LLMscape: A Technolinguistic Exploration of Climate Narratives. The exhibition will open on September 21, 2024, and remain on view until October 20, 2024.
During their residency from June to September 2024, artists Gottfried Haider and ZHANG Jie further developed their installation, LLMscape: A Technolinguistic Exploration of Climate Narratives, based on its prototype. They explored how the contingency and collectiveness inherent in Large Language Models (LLMs) construct the technological processes of virtual entities, and, with the help of game engines, they unlocked new possibilities for ecological narratives.
LLMscape is an exploration of ecological narratives generated through the interactions within and outside a system, skillfully merging the technological emergence of LLMs with the climate crisis as represented by island. Central to LLMscape is a sandbox terrain, a contemporary adaptation of the sand table—a tool traditionally used in military simulations to strategize and predict outcomes within complex systems. In this context, the sandbox becomes a site of ecological simulation, populated by artificial agents each endowed with dispositions, memories, and the capacity for planning. They embody a blend of human and non-human perspectives, with behaviors evolving over time, shaped by both their inherent characteristics and interactions with participants.
Via speech or physical manipulation, one could engage with the system, intervening with the trajectories of the virtual world. Every subtle change and language input is reflected in the artificial, revealing the intricate causalities inherent in real-world ecological systems.