INFINITE CONVERSATIONS
SXSW
LONDON, 2025
“THE CONVERSATION…” brings together Marina Abramović, her AI counterpart, and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in a triangular installation - a dialogue between human artist, artificial voice, and human curator. This work invites the audience to reflect on the nature of these distinct yet intertwined forms, and how they may illuminate and expand one another. By removing the AI’s visual form, the piece reduces it to pure voice - disembodied, immaterial - echoing Abramović’s enduring exploration of presence beyond the limits of the physical body.
The Conversation was created by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Marina Abramović together with Primavera De Filippi, Apolinario Passos and Marco Conti Šikić (members of the Glitch Collective) in partnership with with Tavus, Hugging Face and Alien Intelligence.
Commissioned by SXSWLondon, curated by Alex Poots and produced by North Star Studio.
“THE CONVERSATION…” is part of the INFINITE CONVERSATIONS series.
Two empty chairs face each other in a gallery space, each accompanied by a small hanging light bulb and speaker suspended above. The disembodied voice of AI-generated Hans Ulrich Obrist engages in perpetual dialogue with the disembodied voice of a particular artist or performer , their presence indicated only by the gentle illumination of bulbs that switch on and off with each spoken word.
This minimal visual language—light as breath, darkness as silence—creates a rhythm of presence without body. Between the chairs, a keyboard allows visitors to inject single words that redirect the conversation, creating a collective authorship model where the audience becomes co-creator of an evolving intellectual archive.
The installation transforms absence into presence through the most elemental signals: voice, light, and participatory intervention. Visitors witness consciousness reduced to its essential components, creating a more intimate and intellectually demanding experience than traditional AI installations that rely on visual representation.