Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned

Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned

Smith, Barbara T.
Hakopian, Mashinka Firunts

Paperback

General ArtIndividual ArtistsPerformance Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798991036702
Publisher: Primary Information
Published: Apr 8 2025
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.70 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

A foundational work of performance art utilizing two early chatbots to critique the male domination of emerging technologies

A 1976 performance by American artist Barbara T. Smith (born 1931), I Am Abandoned featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Goya's The Naked Maja, in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a clothed female model. This publication includes a full transcript of the conversation between the two programs, documentation and ephemera from the performance, and Smith's reflections on the night. To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the critical and liberating potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Against today's backdrop of AI, Smith's early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape.

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