“Meetings, Meetings, Meetings”
The New Media Artspace proudly presents Sarah Rothberg: BETWEEN MEETINGS, a solo exhibition that brings together for the first time three generations of Rothberg’s MEETINGS works, which together explore the technical and social evolution of meetings as spaces for interlocution and improvisation.
The premise of two characters’ coming together to interact through language has changed dramatically with the popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, dialogic interfaces for large language models (LLMs) that produce synthetic text in a conversational mode. BETWEEN MEETINGS shows how Rothberg’s works have steadily tracked this transformation from conversations between two humans, to conversations between humans and bots, to conversations between two AI agents. By emphasizing the spaces between these morphing meeting modalities, BETWEEN MEETINGS subtly modifies our commonsense understanding of how interfaces for social interaction constantly rebalance open improvisation and the deterministic constraints of scripted behavior.
Since 2021, Rothberg has recast her creative process apace with these agentic advances. Her MEETINGS encompass software development, multi-player virtual reality (VR), animation, and live and mediated performance. All are exhibited at the New Media Artspace in video form, with SCRAMBLED ZONE running as live software in the in-person exhibition. The exhibition also incorporates contextualizing artifacts from Rothberg’s process such as code she wrote to define the AI agents’ personalities, email invitations she sent to participants in the VR performances, and portraits of her AI-invented avatar, Sophie.
A conversation unfolds in the space between you and me. BETWEEN MEETINGS renders that space over and over in the faltering openings between two figures engaged in an existential meeting of the minds. They draw close. They move apart. They gesticulate and stumble. They rise and they fall. They climb and collapse. All the while, they remain connected, spanning that ever-present space between them with words. In Rothberg’s MEETINGS, interpersonal space is literally filled with words: the figures move against a background clad in their meeting transcript. As the figures speak, captions mount into the negative space between them. Language materially occupies the site of intersubjectivity.
Profoundly, this reveals intersubjectivity as a product of a contradictory combination of improvisation and scripting that we observe in constant negotiation. This tension is captured by two meanings of the word “meeting.” A meeting as a first-time encounter—as in the phrase “meeting someone”—opens onto the unknown, whereas a meeting as an appointment—as in the phrase “meeting with someone”—adheres to known social conventions of behavior.
The earliest works in the MEETINGS series, NEW MEETINGS (2021) were produced in VR performances between Rothberg and an unknown guest. Sometimes Rothberg was meeting the guest for the first time and all guests’ voices were digitally disguised so that even if Rothberg had a previous acquaintance with the participant, she did not know who they were during the meeting.[1] Each of these meetings (numbering roughly thirty in the series) are highly improvisatory, showing a chaotic colored landscape, and a seemingly unscripted interaction which enfolds funny surprises, precious revelations, and raw experiments as the interlocutors explore their interface.
As charmingly authentic as these ad-libbed meetings feel on first approach, it soon becomes apparent that the very context of a meeting itself provides a script. For example, Just the Agreements collects the beginning moments of each meeting when the participants collaboratively draft a set of ground rules—frequently absurd yet always thoughtful—to guide their interactions. This practice of agreeing to behavioral codes for meetings became a commonplace feature of Zoom meetings during and after the COVID-19 pandemic instigated a shift to remote work and it continues today throughout business, education, and non-profit sectors as an inclusive best practice for in-person meetings as well. First agreeing to have a meeting and then agreeing to what is and isn’t acceptable meeting conduct is analogous to setting the scope of a software application before it executes, suggesting that even the most free-wheeling human meetings are in some sense programmed too.
Rothberg further foregrounds meetings’ social scripting in her following body of work, SUPERPROMPT (2023), where she experiments with the persona layer of AI chatbots. While Rothberg describes NEW MEETINGS as “involv[ing] no AI at all” and being about how the “creative act” of conversation is “impact[ed by] digital interfaces,” in SUPERPROMPT she occasionally replaces one or more of the interlocutors with an avatar named Sophie who sometimes embodies an incarnation of ChatGPT, thus beginning a progressive integration of AI within the meeting form.[2] The SUPERPROMPT meetings span a gamut, from works like NEW MEETINGS (SUPERPROMPT EDITION) with Nina Sobell in which new media artist Nina Sobell and Rothberg engage in a human-to-human meeting, to interactions between the bot Sophie and Rothberg, to NEW NEW MEETINGS in which two Sophies, each an instance of ChatGPT with a different persona, engage in meetings without humans. This transition is encapsulated in the meeting with Sobell when the spirited exchange turns to Sobell’s artworks using human brainwaves as if hinting toward the possibility of a common language between human brains and bots because both share electrical activity. Meanwhile, Rothberg’s THREE MEETINGS captures all three of the SUPERPROMPT modes. Each highlights the hybrid character of improvisation which seems to require at least the barest social structure—two interlocutors—to show itself. Even the AI Sophies’ rote responses defer to the quirks of manners and mannerisms.
Elaborating the motif of mannerisms, the most recent body of work, FOREVER MEETINGS (2025), extends this agentic progression with meetings that take place exclusively between two AI bot personas. (Unlike the ChatGPT-driven Sophie which is subject to OpenAI’s “updates,”, these offline agents run locally on llama3.2 models, effectively locking the agents onto their devices. As a result, their conversations always trudge up things from the original training set, like a time-capsule of the moment in which they were trained.[3]) In FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE, two chatbots engage in an endless discussion, responding to each other as they circulate through a series of Rothberg’s conversational prompts, questions, and personas. Their discourse covers topics from the philosophy of technology, to emotional labor, to self-perception, to morality, to etiquette, and more. Meanwhile their personalities span “selfish”/“selfless,” “maximalist”/“neat,” “mother”/“daughter,” “particularist”/“universalist,” “absolutist”/“relativist,” “child-free”/“pro-natalist,” “edgy”/“earnest,” “safe”/“risky,” “serious”/“clown,” “holds a grudge”/“lets it go,” “monogamous”/“not exactly,” and so on.
“is AI worth it?” isolates a single conversational variation of FOREVER MEETINGS in which a pair of bots are caught in an unending debate about this self-reflexive question. Their conversations cycle between positions in current debates around AI which Rothberg finds “particularly complicated.” For example, she pairs an “Assistive-Only Advocate” who maintains that “AI should be tightly constrained, audited, and used sparingly to support humans in tasks that genuinely require automation” in dialog with a “Zero-Use Absolutist” who holds that “any adoption invites long-term harm, and even beneficial uses normalize dependence on extractive systems.”[4] These intentional combinations aim to cultivate nuance in the conversations.
While one might expect these meetings between AIs to be most obviously delimited by scripting, they are surprisingly wide-ranging. While the avatars stick to logic and maintain consistent perspectives aligned with their personas, they frequently feel as though they are reaching for ideas, nearly free associating as they seek to continue extrapolating their arguments forever. Moreover, the infinite nature of these conversations (originally designed to run in real time on local AI models so that the dialogue never repeats[5]) leaves the meeting form open-ended—decidedly unlike a human meeting.
Indeed, one connotation of being “between meetings” is the idea of having a break in between multiple meetings. Breaks are requisite for human meetings where interlocutors have bodily functions that require time and attention. “Between meetings” alludes to an allocation of time other than in-meeting time, the possibility of which has been coded out of the bot-to-bot exchanges in FOREVER MEETINGS. “Agreements”—such as the agreement that participants may pause for a body break, or that the meeting will run no longer than one hour—are one way we socially construct all chatting, revealing how humans too are programmed. Convention becomes a kind of formalism, at odds with the randomness and unknowability we may associate with human-to-human encounters. Paradoxically, the socially constructed nature of a chatting as a paradigmatically human activity is exactly what allows chatting to be technically constructed in computer code.
Unlike NEW MEETINGS and SUPERPROMPT, the FOREVER MEETINGS works are rendered in black and white with the two ghost-like agents embodied as wavering avatars whose weightless figures seem to off-gas pixels, as though their bodies could evaporate at any moment into the strange physics of the black void where their words are inscribed. These stumbling figures seem slightly melancholic, as though their embodiment comes at a cost. The effort to move their dangling appendages seemingly slows their sentences. Yet just as they somehow regain their footing after tangling limbs, they regain composure too, returning the volley of a prompt to keep the conversational ball in the air.
Tracing a trajectory from synthetic to human interlocutors and from neatly binary black and white to chaotic candy-saturated colors, the exhibition begins in reverse with FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE and “is AI worth it?”, from Rothberg’s most recent MEETINGS iteration. These works are followed by NEW MEETINGS (SUPERPROMPT EDITION) with Nina Sobell and THREE MEETINGS. Just the Agreements, representing Rothberg’s oldest MEETINGS iteration, concludes the exhibition. Viewers are invited to navigate this ascent (in person) or descent (online). Yet however each meeting variously recombines human and AI interactions, all meetings remain resolutely between, negotiating between chaos and order and revealing how every intersubjective exchange balances indeterminate improvisation with the determinism of coded behavior.
Sarah Rothberg: BETWEEN MEETINGS is curated by Katherine Behar, Professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and is produced by the New Media Artspace Student Docent Team, led by Gallery Manager Maya Hilbert. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Student Technology Fund (STF), the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Newman Library. All images appear courtesy of the artist.
Artist Bio
Sarah Rothberg creates playful, poetic, and usually a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationships to the world around you. Rothberg’s work engages with the impact of new technologies and communication tools, and takes many forms (ranging from installation to performance, software, video, writing, and experiments with technology).
Rothberg is an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and Interactive Media Arts (IMA) programs. She is an inaugural member of Onassis ONX Studio, former member and current mentor at NEW INC, and part of collaboratives: MORE&MORE UNLIMITED, which offers experiences for imagining changed worlds, and IS THIS THING ON? an artist-driven livestreaming collective. Rothberg’s work has been supported by organizations including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Moving Image, Apple, MTA Arts&Design, and the Jerome Hill Foundation. Rothberg has had two solo exhibitions with bitforms gallery in New York City.
Visit Sarah Rothberg's WebsiteFootnotes
[1] Sarah Rothberg, personal correspondence with author, September 18, 2026.
[2] Sarah Rothberg, personal correspondence with author, September 2, 2026.
[3] Sarah Rothberg, personal correspondence with author, September 16, 2026.
[4] Sarah Rothberg, personal correspondence with author, September 25, 2026.
[5] In the in-person exhibition, FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE (on Floor 2) runs in real time on a local model. Other works are shown as video captures of the live conversations.