One, three or vectorial chairs

from Kosuth to embeddings

Abstract

This paper takes Joseph Kosuth's work One and Three Chairs (1965) as a starting point to investigate how embeddings in language models reconfigure the question of "chairness": what defines a chair? Kosuth presents three modes of representation (physical object, photograph, dictionary definition) interrogating which best captures its essence. I argue that embeddings constitute a fourth mode of understanding the problem: vectors in latent spaces that represent not the referent itself, but textual patterns about it. Through Vilém Flusser's philosophy of technology, I analyze how this technology operates through proxies, progressively distancing itself from the thing-in-itself. A latent space visualization demonstrates that "chair" emerges not from intrinsic properties but from statistical relations — revealing that models capture how we textualize referents, not how we experience them phenomenologically.