Avital Meshi

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.

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