Us and Them is a multi-modal installation that combines the earlier Portraits of Imaginary people work with neural-net text generation and kinetic sculpture. Trained on a recently-released set of 200,000 tweets from accounts identified as bots after the 2016 US presidential election, this piece features 20 machine-learning-driven printers which endlessly spew AI-generated political tweets by imaginary, generated people. The descending curtain of printer paper creates a central space with a pair of chairs for two people to sit, converse and connect, despite the torrent of machine-generated political propaganda that surrounds them. Us and Them invites the viewer to reexamine their relationship with the machine we live inside and to seek true connection with one another.
