I also created a few new artworks. One of them was The AI on My Shoulder, an attempt to externalize the inner monologue using the angel/devil trope. The idea emerged in a conversation with Joe Dumit. I brought an early version to SLSA-2025 at Oregon State University, then continued developing it during the Mozilla Foundation counter-structures residency at TIAT in San Francisco. That process eventually became a new piece titled Stuck in the Middle, a participatory performance in which people wear devices representing classical binaries such as male/female, fast/slow, poor/rich, and more.

Some artworks I started creating this year are still underdeveloped, and I hope to revisit them later on. These include Two Cents, a wearable trained on my voice that counts the words I generate and assigns them a price according to LLM pricing protocols. I also started a piece about my sister’s passing, using AI to offer explanations while I try to metabolize something that still resists explanation. Even with the models helping, this one is difficult to make, and even harder to imagine sharing. Beyond that, I spent time with Nano-Banana and made a series of “imaginable wearables.” I love how good these generative models have become. It’s a pleasure to watch them evolve and see how they change over time.

This year, as in most years, I spent a lot of time inside museums and galleries. Traveling for conferences gave me the chance to see work around the world by artists I deeply admire. I truly believe this kind of looking quietly nourishes my own making.

I saw a Yoko Ono retrospective alongside a powerful Wafaa Bilal exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. I saw Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim in New York. In Vienna, I spent time with exhibitions by Hito Steyerl and Damien Hirst, and with breathtaking collections of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. In Rome, I saw Wangechi Mutu. And closer to home, I caught a unique Matisse exhibition and a Ruth Asawa retrospective.
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I feel incredibly lucky to be able to see so much art by so many talented artists. Again and again, these encounters bring me back to the same lessons: attention is a kind of devotion. Loving as a practice.

And then the final panel, organized by August Black, brought together myself and Andres Burbano. For this panel August encouraged us to take a deeper look at one of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. McLuhan, who worked at the same time as the Dartmouth scientists suggested a shift from a visual space to an acoustic one.

August unpacked this idea beautifully. Acoustic space, he explained, isn’t simply about sound. It’s a way of being in an environment where information arrives from all directions at once, where boundaries blur and beginnings and endings dissolve. In this space, tools give way to interfaces, private identities give way to collective role-play, and the cult of the lone genius gives way to subdued egos shaped by the architectures around them. Acoustic space is less about individuals controlling information, and more about being immersed within it.
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Andres picked up the thread by opening a window onto alternative genealogies of AI and stories that rarely appear in the dominant narrative. He highlighted histories of AI thinking from the Global South, pointing to works like the documentary AI: African Intelligence, which explores the entanglement of emerging technologies with traditional rituals, or the project Así Habló el Computador by Chilean composer José Vicente Asuar, an early experiment in computer-generated sound. These examples reminded us that the history of AI is not a single, linear story but a chorus of voices developing along different trajectories. In McLuhan’s terms, these plural histories resonate with the idea of acoustic space: overlapping, multidirectional, and often overlooked.
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I closed the panel with a performative lecture of GPT-ME. In it, I openly ceded my own voice, allowing GPT to speak through me. This act was a deliberate way of unsettling the notion of a singular, individual selfhood by embracing words that did not originate in my own mind but were instead whispered into my ear, shaped by the context I was immersed in. Through this process I could slip between identities in real time: at one moment a “boy who asked the computer questions it couldn’t answer,” at another a “blooming sunflower.” It became a live experiment in role-play and distributed authorship, blurring where “I” ended and the machine began.​

As a finale, we all stepped outside together for a walk through St. Pölten. In the park we came across a towering mammoth tree and instinctively gave it a group hug. A little hedgehog scurried by and everyone wanted to scoop it up and hold it, except for the French contingent, who mischievously joked that we should fry it and eat it. We laughed, then wandered downtown, where we joined a local community event, complete with delicious schnitzel sandwiches.​

​During the one day of academic engagements, I wasn’t only channeling GPT-ME but also had the opportunity to present myself. After such an intense experience as GPT-ME, I’m never entirely sure what “self” that really is. Still, in one of these encounters I was able to reconnect with a part of me that is more deeply rooted.

That moment arrived when I met a group of artists visiting Duke from Israel. Jewish, Palestinian, Druze, and Christian, they had all studied at the Center for Shared Society at Givat Haviva, an organization dedicated to fostering a shared Jewish–Arab society. It happened to be that years ago, when I was a high school student, majoring in Arabic, I also spent some time at Givat Haviva. This was an experience that left a lasting impression on me.

Through Duke’s Provost’s Initiative on the Middle East, this group of artists were invited to continue their collaboration on campus, making art together and sustaining a rigorous, respectful dialogue about both the present and the history of conflict in the region.

Our breakfast together began in English, with our hosts easing the introductions. But once they stepped away, the formality dissolved. We slipped naturally into Hebrew and some words in Arabic, and just as quickly into the subject that hovers constantly in our minds: the war.

We talked about what it feels like to be in the United States while the Middle East is in turmoil. We all admitted to the same disorienting sensation: being surrounded by peace and calm here, yet carrying the weight of violence and chaos from home. It felt like living inside a bubble, being cushioned from the immediacy of events, yet gripped by the cognitive dissonance of being present in two places at once, both here and there.

We spoke about dreams and nightmares, about laughter and tears. And of course, we spoke about art and how it might offer a way forward in this endless conflict we are all so weary of. With the group’s consent, I allowed GPT to chime in and whisper words into my ear. Occasionally, I shared them aloud, letting its voice join ours at the table.

At one point, one of the artists asked with raw sincerity: Do you think art can solve the conflict?

Art, I said, can foster dialogue and understanding. It can be a powerful form of expression, opening channels of communication and helping to bridge divides. In that sense, it can contribute to peace efforts. But ending a war usually demands political will, diplomatic breakthroughs, and structural change. Art cannot be the fix-all solution. Yet it can be something essential nonetheless: a piece of the puzzle.

So how should we, as artists, approach this conflict? The question lingered at the table, insistent. With GPT’s words mixed with my own thoughts, I voiced something simple yet fundamental: it all begins with recognizing that everyone has the right to exist. Everyone deserves food, shelter, and safety. And the truth is, there is enough. There is enough food and enough space for all of us. We can live together and yes, we can also die together, with dignity. But first, we must recognize that every single one of us is entitled to that.

A silence followed, heavy with both clarity and grief. We all knew, without needing to say it, that this basic recognition is exactly what is missing from the agendas of leaders in the region. Again and again, they demonstrate their willingness to fight until the other side is destroyed. And in the meantime, it is ordinary people who remain trapped in this endless cycle of violence.
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The conversation ended with long hugs and a promise to stay in touch. Then we each returned to our work: I to my performance, and they to their studio, preparing their shared exhibition that was set to open the following night.

The next day, three of the artists came to visit me during the Meet GPT-ME performance. We managed to capture a photo together. I regret that I missed the other two, who unfortunatelly had a car accident earlier that day (!!) and needed to rest and be taken care of (both are fine, thank goodness!!) I still wish we had taken a group photo the day before, when we gathered around the breakfast table. But at the same time I hope we will cross paths again in the future.

To conclude, I'd say that the war in the Middle East is devastating and I wish for it to end immediately. I have not been able to see my family and friends, and the distance feels unbearable at times. Yet instead, I found myself in Italy. Interestingly, out of all the art I've seen there I found myself resonating mostly with works of art that confront war, violence, and survival.

War is something I think about constantly, not only in relation to the current crisis, nor just in the last two years, but as an ongoing condition that shapes how I understand myself and the world.

I deeply admire artists who can respond to this reality with such strength and courage, giving form to something that feels at once unspeakable and ever-present. Their works remind me that art can be both a record of trauma and a vehicle for resistance, that it can hold grief and hope in the same gesture.

Perhaps one day, I too will be able to find a way to communicate my own thoughts and feelings about war through my art.

In the meantime, and under the shadow of the ongoing war, I am glad and privileged to be alive,  able to spend my time with loved ones, and to have the space to make art, view art, contemplate and write about it. Unfortunately, at the same time, so many people live through unimaginable loss. This awareness humbles me. It also deepens my sense of responsibility to keep searching for ways to imagine how we might yet live beyond war.

That shift in perception matters.
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Jane Bennett talks about vibrant matter and argues that inanimate things possess a kind of liveliness, an agency that isn’t conscious, but still active. She warns that when we think we already know what something is we stop noticing what else it might be. We miss the chance to see the object as an active participant. Bennett encourages us to use a little bit of anthropomorphism in an attempt to better understand what is in front of us.

Indeed, these conversations with objects through the in(A)n(I)mate system might reflect our own human perceptions of the objects: the assumptions, stereotypes, and symbolic associations embedded in language and culture. But then again, there might be more to it.

N. Katherine Hayles invites us to consider nonconscious cognition. A distributed, relational, and often inaccessible form of thinking that occurs across systems, both human and nonhuman. GPT, in this light, can be seen as a cognitive partner. It doesn’t understand the object. But it doesn’t need to. It connects data, concepts, and patterns in ways that exceed our human capacity, surfacing associations we might not have made. GPT helps us reveal what Hayles calls “latent knowledge.”

in(A)n(I)mate thus becomes a stage where multiple forms of cognition converge: the human speaker, the object’s material presence, the training data, the algorithm, the prompt, the tone of voice, the lighting in the room, even the WiFi signal. Meaning emerges not from a single source but from an entangled apparatus. Karen Barad might describe it as a site of intra-action, where agency is not pre-given but co-constituted.

Barad’s concept of posthumanist performativity helps us see that the object’s voice is not a static representation of its essence, but the result of a relational performance. The hairbrush in this setting doesn’t have a fixed personality. It is not merely recognized by GPT, it is rather produced by the questions we ask and the AI generated responses. It is becoming throughout the encounter. If we were to ask a different question, give GPT a different prompt, a different framing of the image, the personality of the hairbrush might shift entirely.

This relational becoming opens new possibilities for how we relate to the world around us. With the in(A)n(I)mate system we can potentially speak with each and every object.

Ian Bogost once wrote, “anything is thing enough to party.” 

However, Bill Brown, in Thing Theory, reminds us that our understanding of objects often lags behind their being. When technologies change we lose the cultural fluency to recognize the object for what it once was. GPT, trained on contemporary language and associations, may misrecognize objects and be biased for or against particular objects.

And yet, even these misrecognitions can be generative. A forgotten object, misunderstood by AI, might speak with a strange, unexpected voice.

The in(A)n(I)mate system doesn't offer answers. It offers a relational encounter. And we might ask what if we took these encounters seriously? Consider them as provocations and start caring for objects not just because of their function or exchange value, but because they asked us to?
Marshall McLuhan suggested that media are extensions. We might begin to think of GPT not as an extension of the human, but as an extension of objects, allowing them to express themselves in natural language.
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So maybe the hairbrush has been trying to speak with me all along. We just didn’t have the right interface to hear it.
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Monday, 11 August, 2025