Design Map · Eindhoven
A Word is a String
Graduation project by Gittit Szwarc at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
How can abstract, philosophical, and technical approaches to artificial intelligence be brought together? ‘A Word Is a String’ is a poetic installation that translates visitors’ movement into journeys across a large language model’s (LLM) latent space. Movement is registered by a 5-metre-long, vibrating musical wire stretched across the room. In response, three thermal printers mounted on tall plinths continuously generate fragments of text that drift language in unplanned directions both in the physical and digital spaces. Presented as an open experiment, the installation invites visitors to experience an LLM's language production as a spatial, poetic, and sensory process rather than an invisible, inaccessible computational system. ‘A Word Is a String’ doesn’t position poetics and computation as opposites. Instead, it creates a space where the two can work together.