“in(A)n(I)mate – AI-Mediated conversations With Inanimate Objects” by Meshi and Wright
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- in(A)n(I)mate - AI-Mediated conversations With Inanimate Objects
Session/Category Title:
- Agency and Performance
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
Have you ever imagined engaging in a conversation with the everyday objects around you? What if your water bottle could share its life story? What if your hairbrush could tell you its thoughts about brushing your hair? Or what if an orange could say a few words before being eaten? in(A)n(I)mate is an interactive AI-based installation that brings this imaginative concept to life. The installation showcases an innovative use of GPT’s multimodality feature, enabling it to process both text and image as input. Participants are invited to choose an object they wish to converse with, place it in front of a black box that captures an image, and analyze it through OpenAI’s GPT-4. Once GPT recognizes the object in the image, it generates responses in its style. Participants can then engage in a real-time conversation with the object as if it could actually speak and share its perspective.
References:
[1] Karen Barad. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of women in culture and society 28, 3 (2003), 801–831.
[2] Jane Bennett. 2009. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
[3] Ian Bogost. 2012. Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota Press.
[4] Bill Brown. 2001. “Thing Theory.“. Critical Inquiry 28, 1 (2001), 1–22.
[5] Graham Harman. 2018. Object-oriented ontology: A new theory of everything. Pelican Books.
[6] N Katherine Hayles. 2025. Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts. University of Chicago Press.
[7] Martin Heidegger. 1962. Being and time. Harper.
[8] Marshall McLuhan. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.
[9] Avital Meshi. 2024. GPT-ME: A Human-AI Cognitive Assemblage. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 7, 4 (2024), 1–8.
[10] Avital Meshi and Angus G Forbes. 2020. Stepping inside the Classification Cube: An intimate interaction with an AI system. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2020 Art Gallery. 387–393.
[11] Thomas Nagel. 1980. What is it like to be a bat? In The language and thought series. Harvard University Press, 159–168.
