A collaborative art project exploring whether large language models can facilitate a dialog between different forms of artistic expression. Parallax is the shift in an object's apparent position when seen from two vantage points, a phenomenon that allows us to perceive depth. Emergent describes a pattern that arises from many separate, seemingly unconnected events: a shape that no single contributor designed.

Parallax is inspired by the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, in which artists contribute to a shared work without seeing what came before. Here, a poet and a photographer collaborate over weeks or months, never reading or viewing each other's submissions directly. An open-source language model sits between them as a translator.

Each round, the model extracts themes from what one artist has made (emotional themes from poetry, visual themes from photographs) and passes only those details to the other. The artists respond to the prompts, not their partner's work directly.