The Infinite Conversation is an AI-generated, neverending conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Upon entering the website, the visitor is taken to a random point in the dialogue. New segments of the conversation are automatically added at various times and they can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, the conversation can continue until the end of time.

 

Built with freely available tools, this work was born out of a simple epiphany: that in 2022, voice cloning tools were becoming both too good and too easy to use. And that the world was (and will remain for a long time) utterly unprepared to deal with the potentially heinous consequences.

 

I am not proud of having created this without asking consent from Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, but I think that was an important part of proving the point: unscrupulous players might have even fewer moral qualms while unleashing these powers upon far more nefarious uses. I wish Žižek took the jest in higher spirits than he did. But I have reasons to believe that at least Herzog approached it more philosophically. Then again, I also learned that Herzog does not hold Žižek very dear, so I’m sorry to have accidentally created a version of hell for his AI-avatar.

 

As of June 2023, over a million minutes of the Infinite Conversation have been listened to by many hundreds of thousands of people around the world, hopefully contributing to spark a conversation that at the very least, will raise awareness about Deepfakes. Read more about this project on Scientific American, Tank Magazine and Literary Hub.

 

Update July 2015:
As of today, Youtube allows to see an immersive version of Chemin Vert out of the box. This is the best way to watch the video on a mobile device. Make sure to pick the best resolution (1440p)!

 

Chemin Vert is an immersive video of a trip on the road at supersonic speed spanning across five continents and four seasons. The title “Chemin Vert” refers to its soundtrack from musician A Ghost Train. The video exists in two forms: an immersive version and a “regular” video you can see on vimeo.

 

The bone shattering speed simulated is roughly over 1500 km/h (that’s close to 1000 mph, you imperialists). The whole concept is the visualization of one of my childhood fantasies, riding a rocket launched at full speed just above the ground of a long road.

 

Chemin Vert has been brewing over a few years. Different techniques were employed in the beginning, involving long trips on the road across Europe while shooting time-lapse videos on the go. Back then the scope of the project was substantially different, concentrating more on the augmentation (as in augmented-reality) of landscapes. At a certain point the focus was shifted on the aesthetic qualities of the landscapes and on the immersive factor. In the final version of Chemin Vert the original footage comes from Google Street View, without which this project wouldn’t have been possible. Thanks Google. Thoogle.

 

The original version of Chemin Vert as immersive, interactive video can be appreciated at its fullest resolution here. The ultimate form of Chemin Vert is still waiting to be built: an installation as a full-dome projection.

 

This project was developed using Flash, a now-defunct technology. In order to view it, you will need to install a browser plugin called Ruffle.
Firefox plugin | Chrome plugin

 

Slippery Concepts is semantic-crossword explorer. Start with a word of your choice. Clicking on a letter of that word, a new one is crossed. The relation is twofold: there’s an orthographic connection (the two words now share a letter in common) and a semantic link. The new word can be a synonym, a hyponym or a hypernym of the original one. This is the beginning of a journey that can potentially bring you from any word to any word in a given number of steps.

 

Henry Adams once said that “no one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous”. Slippery Concepts is a way to experience that first hand, building stairway-crosswords that rise up to new unpredictable meanings or slip down to the very core of language.

 

Conceived for a touch table installation, Slippery Concepts can be fun from a browser too.