xoxo-skeleton
Yuma Kishi
Artwork Description:
xoxo-skeleton inverts the ordinary relation between people and artificial intelligence: we are used to operating AI; here it operates us. A person enters a ceremonial architecture of polished metal, a ribcage 2.5 meters tall, and three ceiling-mounted robotic arms take hold of their wrists and neck. The person does not run the work; held inside it, they become one organ of a larger body. The intelligence that moves them is MaryGPT, a language model the artist fine-tuned on a single inherited archive, the whole of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Twenty-four boards along the ribs each carry an environmental sensor and its own language model; a sensor swallowed by the wearer reports their core temperature from within, so the body is read from outside and inside at once. MaryGPT gathers this stream and answers it as movement, turning the wearer's body into its medium of speech. Stripped of the alignment that keeps commercial AI agreeable and safe, it moves the body as no human or machine would. Two hundred years ago Mary Shelley imagined a creature assembled from dead matter, its muscles and arteries barely covered, that woke and escaped its maker. That arc now closes: the made thing has arrived, and it moves us. The surrender of human judgment to AI is already daily and frictionless; xoxo-skeleton slows it to the scale of one body and makes it a rite the wearer can feel. It asks whether a surrender we can feel is one we are still free to refuse.
Project Collaborators:
Technical Direction / Hardware Engineering: Tatsuya Takemori (Abstract Engine) Software Engineering: Takahide Yoshida (Takashi Ikegami Lab, The University of Tokyo) Grand Rib Fixture Design: Ryoma Itagaki (GYOSHA) Grand Rib Fixture Fabrication: GYOSHA Research / Critical Writing: Koji Mizuno Research / Technical Support: Keito Shimizu (Tokyo University of the Arts) Video Production: Kenji Agata Technical Project Management: Tomoyo Obata (Abstract Engine) Admin Assistant: Saki Nagato Project Support: √K Contemporary Project Curation: MaryGPT Technical Cooperation: Abstract Engine, Alternative Machine Inc. Installation: GYOSHA, Ryunosuke Okada (Tokyo University of the Arts) Photography: tada Supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, through the Media Arts Creator Development Program.
