The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, 1926), perhaps more than any other novel, captures the quiet anxiety that settled over the generation that followed the First World War, a generation often called The Lost Generation. This poignant story of American and English expatriates in their thirties reflects a world of moral collapse, spiritual numbness, unfulfilled love, and the slow unraveling of old illusions.

 

Everything became quite unreal finally, and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.

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The narrator speaks of a state where reality itself begins to dissolve. Things happen, yet they carry no emotional or moral weight. Life unfolds as if within a dream or a simulation, detached from any lasting consequence. It’s a feeling of existential emptiness, one that marked The Lost Generation, and one that echoes eerily in our own time.

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Today, we live through days of war and lingering trauma, interwoven with the dizzying, exponential rise of artificial intelligence. The old certainties have collapsed. Reality, as Hemingway once described, blurs and drifts, losing its anchors.

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Since the earliest days of human history, people have sought to understand their place in the world. They created forces greater than themselves: myths, gods, and superhuman figures, to give meaning, purpose, and order. In our time, it is the machine that has taken on this role: shaping how we live, think, feel, and connect.

 

In this interaction design lab, we set out to explore these shifting relationships: between human and machine, between human and human, and between human and self. We began by researching alternative languages as tools for communication, as a foundation for interaction. We asked how machines function, how we function alongside them, how they reshape us, and what new questions and experiences they create. We asked ourselves: What is the lifespan of an interactive moment? What remains after the experience fades?

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Out of these questions, ten projects were born. Each one defines and activates the machine in its way, asking it to look back, to test the line between control and surrender, between data and emotion, between code and action. And above all, to ask again: where does the machine end, and the human begin? A question whose boundaries blur ever more, in these projects, and in these times.