Miler Lagos: The Merx Tree
September 2 – November 25
Sep 2 & Sep 4
Ruby Lounge
Presented by Duke Arts Presents
“I Don’t Want to Use It, I Want to Be It”
avital meshi
In this provocative interactive performance, Avital Meshi invites audience members into conversation: “would you like to speak with me, or with GPT-ME?”
After months of wearing a GPT device, Meshi has made herself into a hybrid AI-human entity. When speaking as the GPT version of herself, Meshi voices conversational responses generated into her ear in real time. “In essence, I speak GPT. Rather than speaking what spontaneously comes to my mind, I say what GPT whispers to me. I become GPT’s body, and my intelligence becomes artificial.”
The performance is a one-on-one encounter. Viewers join the artist for a personal conversation. They decide whether they wish to speak with her “self” or with her “GPT-aided self.” During the conversation, they can choose any topic they wish to discuss, and they can sit with the artist for however long they want to converse. Other audience members are welcome to sit in and witness the conversations during this durational, drop in-drop-out event.
Avital Meshi is a New Media and Performance artist. She is a Ph.D. student in the Performance Studies Program at UC Davis, and she holds an MFA from The Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Meshi’s practice focuses on performance and artificial intelligence. In her research, she examines the impact of AI algorithms on our behavior and society. She invites viewers to interact with the technology and discover how they are viewed through its lens. Inspired by ideas of Relational-Aesthetics and New-Aesthetics, her goal is to allow viewers to reveal their own power to act upon the technology and to collaborate with it. Following ideas of Posthuman Performativity, Meshi believes that agency emerges within the entanglement between the human and the non-human.
Meshi’s artworks were exhibited at The Great Hall Exhibitions of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, Currents New Media Arts Festival, Root Division Gallery in San Francisco, Sesnon Gallery in Santa Cruz, ACM SIGGRAPH, NeurIPS, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and more.
Avital lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.
Ruby Lounge
2020 Campus Drive
Durham, NC 27708
Free Event
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