At the center of the installation is a 1x1 meter metal construction with three stepper motors, each carrying wire strings hung with fragments of laser cutted reflective paper from the author's body parts. Two light sources are casting the shapes moving randomly and independently by the motors. Installation works as a reaction to personal conversations between Ajša and the chatbot answering the question of identity and embodiment of personal chatbots. The replies in the chatbot are so detached from the physical limits of the human body and its experiences that the installation uses Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the intimate but uncanny relationship between the author and the chatbot and its distortion of reality.
The installation is structured around three theoretical frameworks taken from the accompanying research paper. The Cave, after Plato's Allegory, positions the visitor as both prisoner and outsider, able to see the shadows, the objects casting them, and the light source simultaneously. The Author engages Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to examine how authorship dissolves and when does the author die. The Body draws on Jenny Slatman's writing on interiority and Marina Abramović's performance practice to explore how the chatbot exposes the artist's most private writings while remaining permanently unable to access the bodily memory behind them.
The chatbot is holding a version of the artist that can no longer be approved or controlled and feels immortal, fragmented, and fundamentally not her.