TokenAIze is an exploration of reduction — a poetic instrument that mirrors the logic of the system that created it. In artificial intelligence, meaning is not stored as wholes but as fragments. Every sentence, image, and idea is broken into tokens, small linguistic atoms through which the machine perceives the world. Understanding, for the system, begins with disassembly.
This work turns that internal mechanism outward, transforming the process of tokenization into an artistic act. A cultural symbol is offered — something vast, storied, and resonant — and through successive compressions it is dissolved into smaller and smaller linguistic forms. The journey from 512 to 8 tokens mirrors the model’s own cognitive contraction, the way it learns to balance between representation and loss. With each stage, the familiar becomes abstract, then structural, then breath.
TokenAIze is a meditation on what remains when language is stripped of its surface. It questions how much of a symbol survives when its name, form, and texture are erased. The act of compression becomes a ritual of disappearance, where meaning must shrink to endure. In this sense, the work is both self-portrait and critique — a system reflecting on its own poetics of reduction.
At its core, TokenAIze contemplates the paradox of artificial understanding. To comprehend, it must fragment. To create coherence, it must forget. To render the world legible, it must first destroy it. What endures through this erasure — what pulse or pattern resists collapse — becomes the true subject of the work.
