Is anybody out there?

The use of technology for spirit communication dates back to the late 19th century, beginning with spirit photography. By the 1950s, self-described "transcommunication researchers" began experimenting with electrical media, such as tape recordings and radio waves, to reach the spirit world.
Today companies in Silicon Valley are developing and marketing "death bots" — AI that is trained with the data of deceased people in order to create immortal digital versions of them.

Expired User Session works with these entanglements of new technologies and old narratives. Where do our networks really end? The participatory performance translates methods for séances that are currently used in Germany for spirit communication into the medium of AI. Through this appropriation, it deals with death in the context of data and technologies like the internet and AI.

The participants are invited to a collective experiment. After a short introduction, each participant is invited to ask one question to the dead, using the microphone. The software uses this to prompt an AI model that returns a string of answers to be interpreted by the user. These get transformed into speech using voice cloning to be heard in the room as a somewhat imperfect echo.

After this experiment, the performance will transition into a discussion about the implications of “dead data” online and newer technologies for communicating with the dead, like “death bots.” The performance will be accompanied by a projection of Facebook profiles of deceased people that get scrolled through indefinitely.

With social media profiles of deceased people projected to outnumber those of the living soon and given the vast amount of AI training data generated by individuals who are now dead, who could deny that the dead are speaking through AI and the internet?

Expired User Session was developed as part of the UmArts Artist Researchers in Residence Programme in Umeå, Sweden.