プレオーダー *3月19日以降出荷予定

アメリカ人アーティスト、バーバラ・T・スミス（Barbara T. Smith）の作品集。1976年に展開された、世にあまり知られていない先見的なパフォーマンスの記録である。

画家のフランシスコ・デ・ゴヤ（Francisco Goya）による油彩作品「裸のマハ（Naked Maja）」（1795-1800年）、「着衣のマハ（The Clothed Maja）」（1800 –1807年）を用いている。二つの作品のかたわらで、初期のチャットボットの二つとして今では知られている、二種の精神分析コンピューター・プログラム間においてリアルタイムで交わされた会話を記録しており、作者は一人の女性モデルの上にこの有名な絵画作品の画像を投影した。本書には、この二つのプログラムがやりとりした「会話」の全記録、パフォーマンスを行なった時のドキュメントやエフェメラ、作者が開催した夜を振り返る考察テキスト、そして学者でありアーティストのマシンカ・フィルンツ・ハコピア（Mashinka Firunts Hakopian）による後書きが収録されている。

Available for pre-order now. *It will be shipped after 19 March

I Am Abandoned documents a little-known, but visionary  performance by Barbara T. Smith. Taking place in 1976, it featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (known today as two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Francisco Goya’s The Naked Maja (1795 – 1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800 – 1807), in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a female model. The publication includes a full transcript of the “conversation” between the two programs; documentation and ephemera from the performance; Smith’s reflections on the night; and an afterword by scholar and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.

I Am Abandoned was part of the exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and rather than simply celebrate new technology, Smith also sought to challenge what she saw as a “built-in problem” that “computers were only a new example of the male hypnosis.” In collaboration with computer scientist Dick Rubinstein, she enlisted the computer science teams at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mount a conversation between a program named DOCTOR, which was designed to be a surrogate therapist, and another named PARRY which was trained to mimic a paranoid schizophrenic patient.

While the computer operator worked in the next room, each new page of the conversation was projected on the wall where a model dressed as The Clothed Maja reclined beneath the text, with a slide of the nude version of the same painting, The Naked Maja, projected onto her. The audience was rapt with attention for the livestreamed conversation. The performance went on for nearly two hours, before the model eventually grew furious from being ignored (abandoned) by the computer operator, stormed over, and attempted to seduce him. Shortly after, the gallery director pulled the plug on the entire event, claiming it distracted the audience for too long from the other works on view.

To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the artistic and truly liberatory potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Much like the original performance, in which the model grew alienated from the proceedings, what gradually emerges are the stakes these new technologies present. Against today’s backdrop of AI and a still male-dominated tech field, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape. Though Smith, like many women of her generation, was overlooked by the landmark surveys of art and technology during the 1960s and 70s, her career incisively probed new technologies, using them to question gender dynamics, community, and self. Her projects from the Coffin books (1966-67), created with a 914 Xerox copier in her dining room, to performances like Outside Chance (1975), which created a small snow squall in Las Vegas out of 3,000 unique, computer-generated snowflakes, and the interactive Field Piece (1971), where participants’ movements altered the soundscape of a fiberglass forest, all exemplify her open-ended approach to art and tech. “Each person lit their own way,” Smith remembers, “And produced their own soundtrack.”