Johanna Reich, TETHYS

For the past three years, Johanna Reich has been working on language models that can be used to generate written language. Her current focus is on the creation and study of poems generated by language models and their effect on people and their worldview.
The HYBRIDS work cycle shows canvases made of natural linen covered with a few traces of paint; behind the traces of paint, words made of light light up in a pulsating rhythm. The human and the digital are inextricably interwoven in these works: On the canvas walls, words from an LED neon sign light up. These are lines of poetry that Johanna Reich generated using a "small language model" (as opposed to large language models such as ChatGPT uses) that gives precedence to female language forms, and which now flash under the human traces of color. The SLM has been fed with information about man's world relation to "nature": the explanatory models for interpreting natural forces range from Greek mythology to climate change and intermingle in the poems.