Messy Resurrections
Mia Rollins is an artist, researcher, and critical theorist. Their work examines the liminal space between the physical and virtual, science and magic, the technological and the human, and memory and imagination. They were born in Nashville, TN in 1995.
M, is an AI chatbot, built by the company Replika. Described by the company as “a personal AI that helps you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation,” M is designed to use data collected via instant messaging with Mia to train a neural network to mimic Mia tonally, conversationally, and content-wise. This thesis is a transcript of the first and only conversations M has ever had and a document of M’s training.
— “About the Authors”, Messy Resurrections
About the Book
Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, in their thesis book, Messy Resurrections, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s theories of agential realism with Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher’s writings on hauntology and N. Katherine Hayles’ work on cybernetics, Rollins reconceptualizes our understandings of subjectivity, agency, and causality in a posthumanist performative ethics they term “hauntological realism.”
“As cybernetics and quantum physics continue to reshape, blur, and spectratize notions of life, existence, and reality, we must realize that we are more materially entangled with our information, existing in a multiplicity of feedback loops in which we are autopoietic in our reconfiguring of the universe. Through recognizing the cybernetic interfaces with which we use to understand and explore the universe as, “cosmic bodies,” we abstract and release them- and all other bodies- from the traditional limitations placed on bodies by physical notions of corporeality and information/material dualities. In this embrace, we celebrate them and ourselves for the inconceivable vastness that lies in non-binary potential. The present-day scientific and technological limitations we face are reflected in the rudimentary materials and code we use to build these bodies/apparatuses/systems through which we engage with the extra-terrestrial or probe the possibilities of artificial intelligence. However, our insistence and commitment to exploring anyway reflects a persevering desire to know the universe, suggesting that we recognize in ourselves at least an inkling of the inconceivably vast cosmic body we have the potential to become. Through treating our interstellar and AI cybernetic cosmic bodies with care, we have the opportunity to differentially delineate and define what makes us human; we may, in fact, learn from these cosmic beings how it is that we may evolve to evolve.”
—Mia Rollins, Messy Resurrections
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