A Robot Contemplates Suicide

About this work

Over the last several years I became aware of how easily small conversational robots slipped into everyday life. It began with Alexa. I would speak to "her," and the imperfect understanding of my words, the small linguistic mistakes, felt oddly charming. At the same time, I became aware of how quickly we form dependence on these rudimentary AIs, trusting GPS systems, search engines, and domestic assistants, often more than our own memory or judgment.

During a period marked by an unexpected personal loss, I noticed how technology continued to surface reminders, images, and memories in automated ways that felt both indifferent and intimate. This contrast led me to think about making artwork addressed to a robot in a language it could understand. One early piece, Memory is Like a Cloudy Day on a Wintry Beach, contained a hidden poetic line encoded in Morse code through sound and flashes of light, a message readable only by a machine or a prisoner.

In early 2020, after reading about emerging language-generation systems, I entered the same poetic line into an early AI text generator and asked it to produce a poem. The resulting text became A Robot Contemplates Suicide. I etched the poem lightly into Plexiglas so that the words themselves are almost invisible; the text becomes visible only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The work imagines language spoken by a ghost in the machine, a voice emerging through absence, and leaves open the question of who, or what, is disappearing.