The subject of this work is perception. Perception of a space-being, a technical, engineered body of altered senses. Not a single being, but rather a multiplicity of beings whose movements are shared among machines, apparatuses, screens, humans, lenses - others. Touching Distance embraces the counter-knowledge and alienated potentiality dwelling in a reworked sense of “the in-between”. Not only is it a call for a subtle change of perspective on architecture and on the conditions of inhabitation, but foremost an inquiry on how to perceive, how to think the moving body relative to its (un)built surroundings, and how to accommodate this body considering the contemporary accelerated, networked, multiple and disparate virtually engineered points of view.

"The smallest possible theater is a theater not without spectators or without actors, but one in which the spectator perceives himself as actor, confronting himself as his own performer" (Anton Rey).

Imagine meeting your Avatar, who becomes an autonomous being, a character in a story. How would you perceive this unsupervised Selfie, an actor who looks similar to you? A Subject? Or a mere Thing, an Object, perhaps even an uncanny Double? As a character in the story, your Avatar forms relationships to other personal Avatars. How are you related to those social connections formed independently, without you? Do you feel responsible of the actions of your personal Avatar?

"Hamelin 77" is one of the first movies that combines storytelling about prompt engineering and generative AI with the use of related techniques within its production. The core of the movie is the storytelling around the interaction between humans and AI. But on top of it, and because of it, a diversity of generative AI techniques have been used, including: generation of images from textual prompts, generation of videos produced by navigating the abstract latent spaces produced by artificial intelligence architectures, retraining AI models to add new prompts connected to visuals of the actress, NeRF — volumetric reconstruction of 3D spaces and navigation through the reconstructed space, AI-based synthetic generation of voices (including explorations performed with GPT models) and various AI techniques used during the visual post-production phase. We'll discuss hopes and risks of interacting with future evolutions of a ChatGPT like system, through one of the first movies that reflects on it all.