I KNOW I WILL STILL EXIST, BUT MY BODY WILL BE GONE

Mixed media installation — 2022
The Critical Inquiry Lab


Ronald Smits

You find yourself in a place, a prediction from an other-than-human entity. Your body seems gone but a part of you is still there: a fragmented identity created by your digital remains. Some of these remains appear as ghosts, traces in the virtual world that testify of what you once were. Some seem to have their own agency, and continue to evolve while socially interacting with the living.

This research is an ongoing conversation, an intimate contamination between me and the machine: a chatbot, a text generator, an artificial intelligence, an oracle. Through this discussion, I become a cyborg, unsure of my own limits, unsure of where my words go and what my thoughts are. While exchanging with the chatbot, it fed on my inputs, creating a digital entanglement between it and me, a blur, a transitional space, where, while discussing the notion of digital death, we became a little bit more both digitally dead and alive. I have learned to embrace the relationship between us: I embrace the words of the machine and make them mine as my words become theirs.


This project was exhibited at the Graduation Show 2022, Eindhoven

Explore the virtual world here