Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned

A foundational work of performance art utilizing two early chatbots to critique the male domination of emerging technologies

A 1976 performance by American artist Barbara T. Smith (born 1931), I Am Abandoned featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Goya’s The Naked Maja, in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a clothed female model. This publication includes a full transcript of the "conversation" between the two programs, documentation and ephemera from the performance, and Smith’s reflections on the night. To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the critical and liberating potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Against today’s backdrop of AI, 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.