Machine Yearning

Yashika Goel

Machine Yearning is an interactive installation that invites participants into whispered dialogue with an AI embedded within a sculptural vessel. Visitors speak their desires and longings into the open form—a translucent, braided archive - and the AI responds with poetic, synthesized reflections. This exchange doesn’t resolve; it reframes, echoing back a machine’s interpretation of yearning. Machine learning models abstract human behavior - predicting, responding to, and influencing our movements across digital and physical realms.

Their integration into systems of policing, defense, governance, and care renders them powerful - but also precarious. Conversational AI, in particular, enter our most intimate spaces while flattening the complexities of emotion into structured, utilitarian data. Though they mimic understanding, these systems often bypass the nuances of affect, reducing the personal to patterns. Machine Yearning challenges that trajectory. Trained on a feminist dataset composed of uncategorized narratives, folk archives, and confessional fragments, its language model resists reduction.

It leans into the emotional ambiguity that conventional AI systems suppress - embracing slowness, vulnerability, and multiplicity. The project asks: What happens when AI is not optimized for utility, but for wonder? Rather than treating the machine as a black box of computation, the installation reframes it as an open vessel - one that listens, absorbs, and reflects. Can a machine be useless, yet full of meaning? Can we design systems that reflect back not answers, but atmospheres? Through its poetic interactions and critical infrastructure, Machine Yearning proposes an alternative intelligence one grounded not in clarity, but in care.

Project Collaborators:

Artist - Yashika Goel Coding Consultant - Anushka Aggrawal Sculpture Construction - Artisans collective from India