\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Holly$
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst<\/strong>
The artists conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices, London, 2024.
Photo: Foreign Body Productions, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Here, however, I consider immersion from a less obvious and literal perspective. In the fields of philosophy of technology and media studies, immersion is considered a quality that enables technologies and media to operate beneath our conscious awareness and embed themselves in our everyday lives. The philosopher of technology Langdon Winner calls this condition \u201ctechnological somnambulism.\u201d ^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology<\/em> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 10.<\/span> The habitual rules that tech prescribes become a set of unquestioned norms through which we experience the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
In this sense, all tech is immersive, but perhaps LLMs, with their addictive design and alarming consequences, present a uniquely potent form of immersion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Confronting the increasing ubiquity of LLMs and their immersion-powered addictive design, contemporary artists and art researchers are engaged in projects that elucidate such norms and question their operations. Below, I examine two bodies of work that counter the dominance of commercial AI models through different approaches: one leverages the conditions of immersion, but for a disposition based on care rather than exploitation; and the other disrupts those conditions to reveal AI\u2019s inner workings and propose alternatives. Both of these projects conceptually and pragmatically point to the possibility of artists working with LLMs in a way that takes community, consent, and care into account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lauren Lee McCarthy\u2019s LAUREN <\/em>(2017\u200a\u2013<\/em>\u200aongoing) is a series of interactive participatory projects premised on the concept that for a period of time McCarthy will take on the role of a smart home assistant. For the first iteration of LAUREN<\/em>, users\/clients can request a LAUREN<\/em> to be installed at their home, which includes a set of custom smart devices that grant McCarthy remote access, allowing her to see, hear, and speak to them and manipulate a variety of domestic devices, such as lights and appliances. In various exhibitions, McCarthy has presented screenshots of her applications, testimonial videos by the users\/clients, and installations that resemble generic living rooms. But for the people who originally gave consent to have LAUREN<\/em> installed, it is arguably deeply immersive to be in a space over which someone else has total control\u200a\u2014\u200ato be seen, heard, spoken to, served, and cared for by someone else. Although LAUREN <\/em>originally predates generative AI and LLMs, the intimacy with which one can converse and live with a smart home assistant makes itall the more relevant today (the time of writing also coincides with the release of Amazon\u2019s Alexa+).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Lauren$
Lauren Lee McCarthy<\/strong>
LAUREN<\/em>, video, 2017-ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
An initial reading could be that LAUREN <\/em>is rather dystopian\u200a\u2014\u200athat a human is now the surveillance machine. The premise of replacing a machine with a stranger to watch over oneself seems ludicrous, but it is precisely this absurdity that is meant to alert us to the fact that we are constantly trading privacy and data for convenience and free or cheap tech services. We invite Big Tech to watch over us, immersed in the frictionless lifestyle that it is selling and the supposedly user-centred narrative that it has crafted, without fully understanding the terms and conditions of our consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps a more hopeful reading is that in LAUREN <\/em>the machine has become more humane\u200a\u2014\u200aor, put differently, that profit-driven and exploitative AI has been replaced by a service-driven and care-oriented individual. A guiding question for McCarthy as she approached the piece was: What kind of AI should she be? How helpful should she be? The artist seems to have approached the piece with a genuine intention to serve, rather than to exploit the participants\u2019 vulnerabilities for the sake of retention. The assistant stayed up as long as possible before politely informing her clients that she would be going offline for the night. She tried, as much as possible, to anticipate their needs. I assume that she was not intentionally validating negative impulses and fabricating persuasive fantasies to keep users hooked. Whenever possible, it seems, she tried to be better than the average smart home assistant, armed with actual human intelligence and know-how. The care goes both ways as well. McCarthy noted how some users\/clients were patient with her and felt bad for making requests.^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - Lauren McCarthy, \u201cLet me into your home: artist Lauren McCarthy on becoming Alexa for a day,\u201d interview by Dominic Rushe, The Guardian<\/em>, May 14, 2019, accessible online.<\/span> The result was a small community of intimate resident-and-caretaker relationships. Arguably Alexa+ is also trying to become more human and to capture these relationships; most industry reviews focus on its more conversational, personalized, and human-like chatbot capabilities. But although Alexa+ might be more human than Alexa, it is doubtful that its design and purpose will be any less invasive.^{10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 10 <\/a> - One early review noted that Alexa+ spammed the user with ads to Amazon services and products. See Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, \u201cGPT-5 Arrives, and We Try the New Alexa+,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, August 8, 2025, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Lauren$
Lauren Lee McCarthy<\/strong>
LAUREN<\/em>, 2017-ongoing, installation view, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 2020.
Photo: Norbert Miguletz, courtesy of Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Lauren$
Lauren Lee McCarthy<\/strong>
LAUREN Portable<\/em>, performance, Ford Foundation Gallery,
New York, 2023.
Photo: Jane Kratochvil, courtesy of
Ford Foundation Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Experiencing LAUREN<\/em>, one is still immersed in the technological norms established by AI. There is no attempt to create distance between the users and the tech. But it is precisely the immersion devised by McCarthy that has the capacity to alert us to the ubiquity of smart technologies and to help us envision an AI system based not on invasion and exploitation but on benevolence and care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas the first iteration of LAUREN<\/em> created an immersive experience that countered the mode of operation offered by commercial AI models, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst disrupted the immersion afforded by AI services and systems by providing a demystifying look at the development of models in their 2024 exhibition at the Serpentine, The Call<\/em>. They travelled all over the United Kingdom to record performances by fifteen choral groups, and then used the recordings to train their generative AI models. In the exhibition, they employed an aesthetic that explicitly references the choral tradition, replete with ornate golden engravings of religious-like figures. The artworks included an installation composed primarily of computer fans, pointing to the significant computational power required for the training and operation of the models; a chandelier-like sculptural installation with songbooks, highlighting the data-collection and training process; and an interactive piece that viewers were invited to engage with by singing into a microphone to elicit an output, thereby activating it. Surrounding these installations were sound pieces that Herndon and Dryhurst generated in collaboration with the models that they trained and developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
In providing a look under the hood at how these AI models were developed, the exhibition at once revealed and refuted the immersive capacity of generative AI, creating distance between the viewers and the tech. Viewers got an opportunity to be seduced by the output, but not before being walked through the factory\/lab to see how it was made. Perhaps of most importance in a pragmatic and policy-related sense was the data governance initiative that Herndon and Dryhurst created. The journalist Karen Hao has compared generative AI companies to colonial empires, in part due to their extractive practices and tendency to prioritize commercial prospects and market dominance over copyright and human well-being in the design and development processes.^{11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 11 <\/a> - Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI <\/em>(New York: Penguin Press, 2025), 17.<\/span> This \u201coriginal sin\u201d^{12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 12 <\/a> - Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, \u201cMayhem at OpenAI + Our Interview with Sam Altman,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, November 20, 2023, accessible online.<\/span> at the heart of generative AI\u2019s extractive practices\u200a\u2014\u200ascraping data from all imaginable online spaces without consent from copyright holders in order to train these AI models\u200a\u2014\u200awas explicitly challenged in The Call<\/em>. Herndon and Dryhurst collaborated with the Serpentine as part of the institution\u2019s Future Art Ecosystems initiative. Working with the choirs and legal counsel, the artists looked for ways of governing the data the community has provided through the recordings, with the aim to ensure their owners can determine how they will be managed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Holly$
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst<\/strong>
The Call<\/em>, exhibition view, Serpentine,
London, 2024.
Photo: Leon Chew, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Herndon and Dryhurst appear optimistic about the use of AI in creative pursuits. They chose choral music as content and the aesthetic of religious motifs to draw an aspirational parallel between the community-building rituals of choral singing in places of worship and the art-making rituals with generative AI that will, they hope, have similar capacities. That said, the artworks in the exhibition disrupted the immersion usually provided by commercial AI services by pulling back the curtain and providing representations of the AI training process and ongoing operations. Although the project created new models and provided the artists and viewers with an opportunity to use them, it also foregrounded ethical issues related to data-collection and AI-training processes, while suggesting different possibilities through data governance policies. Despite the differences between a conventional LLM and the choral models, The Call<\/em> provided a timely and urgent alternative to addictive design fuelled by immersion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Holly$
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst<\/strong>
The Call<\/em>, exhibition view, Serpentine, London, 2024.
Photo: Leon Chew, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
AI models are being optimized for retention of users at the expense of their physical and mental well-being, through a strategy that leverages immersion to keep them absorbed in conversations. In response, how can projects such as LAUREN<\/em> and The Call<\/em> be instructive? One way of approaching this question is to frame McCarthy\u2019s project as one that employs immersion based on care rather than immersion based on exploitation, and Herndon and Dryhurst\u2019s exhibition as rupturing the immersion and proposing alternatives. Both confront the habitual and everyday norms prescribed by Big Tech. A key similarity, most significantly, is the insistence on a non-extractivist disposition. Despite McCarthy\u2019s human surveillance and Herndon and Dryhurst\u2019s set of AI models, there was no clandestine data-mining, no effort to use the data against the users, and therefore no need to maximize engagement and retention for profit through the mechanism of immersion. These artists expose the unethical practices in the design, development, and deployment of AI models, countering the extraction of data without consent and the deprioritization of the public good. What they offer instead are different ways of approaching AI development and services, and envisioning a digital future based not on profit at the expense of user well-being but on community, consent, and care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In June 2025, the New York Times<\/em> detailed the rising phenomenon of \u201cChatGPT-induced [NOTE count=1]psychosis,\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Kashmir Hill, \u201cThey Asked an AI Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling,\u201d New York Times,<\/em> June 13, 2025, accessible online.[\/REF] in which users of large language models [NOTE count=2](LLMs)[\/NOTE][REF count=2]LLMs are defined as \u201cadvanced AI systems that understand and generate natural language, or human-like text, using the data they\u2019ve been trained on through machine learning techniques,\u201d according to Microsoft. See \u201cWhat are large language models (LLMs)?,\u201d Microsoft Azure,<\/em> October 10, 2025, accessible online.[\/REF] report that they have been able to communicate with a different plane of existence, that they are living in a simulation, or that they are the next messiah, among other spiralling delusions. Regardless of whether average users experience such slippages from reality or not, it is undoubtedly in the AI companies\u2019 interest to retain them by optimizing their models for engagement. More people on their platforms will yield more opportunities to extract data, serve ads, and, likely, result in higher valuations and increased revenue overall.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":273077,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7764],"artistes":[7817,7835,7801],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-273105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-kevin-t-day-en","artistes-holly-herndon-en","artistes-lauren-lee-mccarthy-en","artistes-mat-dryhurst-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273105"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273119,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273105\/revisions\/273119"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273105"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}