summoningaguardianangelinreallife.exe, 2024

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Along with conceiving of AI as a mutilated potentiality for personhood, autonomy, and self-actualization, another possible avenue of consideration is calling on AI as a form of ritual, and how its manifestations become a form of architecture that facilitates “rituals”, where generative/computing tools and interfaces act as a form of supplication. Like a computational ouija board, familiar frameworks of “AI” (the server, the website, the application, etc.) suppose it as a locus, a place of containment, enclosing the incorporeal, as a sort of archive of objects, ideas, voices, and thoughts. It offers a perceived impenetrable refuge, constructing a reality that is (un)comfortable and (un)familiar. It also represses fear of the known unknown, or the awareness of a vastness that we cannot completely comprehend. The physical pieces of technology, then, function as a “house”. Sigmond Freud uses the German word unheimlich, which he describes is “the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’ ‘belonging to the home’; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar”. Borrowing from Howard Kainz’s parallels of computational mechanisms and Medieval divine metaphysics of angels, the medium of the digital space becomes both the container and vessel of transmission. The uncanny becomes manifest by the presence of something that is simultaneously both known and unknown, which physically and figuratively links the home—the AI container—with open vulnerability, repression, and perversion. It is the masquerade of the divine; it is a being that cannot create, and can only corrupt that which already exists.

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