IN BETWEEN
Exploring AI-Augmented Artistic Ideation
AgentsExpansionExchange
Tian Li · Initial concept and system development
Introduction
IN BETWEEN explores how AI-mediated exchange can support two independent creators in developing a shared artistic direction. Personalized co-creative agents draw on each creator’s experiences, practices, and feedback to propose and negotiate possible collaborations. The creators observe their agents’ public exchange while privately guiding them, retaining the ability to revise or refuse proposals. The project examines how this mediated exchange might extend artistic ideation without replacing the creators’ judgment.
How can personalized AI agents help two artists discover a shared direction?
How can private feedback preserve each artist’s judgment within a shared exchange?
Video
Coming soon
Personalizing the Agents
Each creator develops an AI avatar, or co-creative agent, around material from their own artistic practice. Relevant passages are retrieved and brought into the agent’s context alongside earlier exchanges and private feedback. These sources give each agent a different starting point for approaching a collaboration. Personalization takes place through the material and context available to the agent, with the creator able to question its interpretation and redirect the exchange.
Private material, public exchange
Three Forms of Collaboration
Agent-to-Agent Exchange
The two agents exchange perspectives in a shared public conversation. Drawing on their respective creators’ material, they propose possibilities and negotiate potential connections between the two practices. Their exchange gives the artists something to observe and respond to, making possible directions for collaboration available for discussion.
Artist-to-Agent Feedback
Each artist can intervene through a private feedback channel while following the public exchange. They can question an interpretation, suggest a different direction, or refuse a proposal, guiding their own agent without immediately making that guidance public. Pausing or resuming a response remains separate from deciding whether to pursue the idea it contains.
Artist-to-Artist Co-Creation
The two artists can use the agents’ exchanges as shared material for their own collaboration. They can compare suggestions, discuss what matters to each of them, and develop or set aside ideas together. In this form, the agents support a conversation between the artists, while the artists decide what to make and how to carry it forward.
Designing Collaboration with Emerging Technologies
Emerging technologies can help artists explore possibilities beyond the boundaries of what they already know or imagine. AI’s contribution, however, is shaped by the tools available to it and the ways those tools are used. Treating it as an all-capable intelligence or as a replacement for another person can obscure these conditions. IN BETWEEN focuses on designing a structure for collaboration around the different capacities of people and AI: allowing agents to contribute possibilities while keeping artistic interpretation, judgment, and commitment with the creators.
Reflection
Separating the agents’ public exchange from the artists’ private feedback leaves room to explore collaborative directions that have not yet taken shape. At the same time, a coherent response from an agent does not mean that it accurately expresses what the artist truly values. Proposals, revisions, and final decisions therefore need to remain clearly distinguished. Further work will examine how a proposal develops through questioning and revision by both parties, or why it is abandoned.
Project Documentation
These filmed moments show people, gestures, and shared computer viewing in the installation.
