Doctoral Research

Barbara T. Smith: Performing the Network

Anna's doctoral project centres on the performance artist Barbara T. Smith's pioneering and prescient I Am Abandoned (1976) — the first-recorded public dialogue between two chatbots.

In the fiftieth anniversary year of I Am Abandoned, the project retrieves Smith as a forgotten figure in the cultural pre-history of artificial intelligence. It situates her work against the backdrop of the collaborative techno-social spirit that emerged from the epochal intersection of Cold War computing, corporate culture, and creative countercultures crucial to her California context. In this sense, it aims to illuminate the extent to which the activities of the art-making avant-garde in this era intervened directly in technological, educational, and environmental futures.

The project thus explores 'the network' in Smith's life and work in an expanded sense: not only as specific technical and institutional apparatuses, but also as dynamically linked discourses of cultural, social, and political systems. It aims to explicate Smith’s lifelong engagement with technology as anticipating the way that the authoring of art histories today unfolds within this complex, constantly changing network.