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, staged at the California Institute of Technology in collaboration with the computer scientist Richard Rubinstein at MIT. Smith ran the central conversation alongside a projection of Goya's The Naked Maja (1795–1800) over the reclining body of a female model posing as The Clothed Maja (1800–1807), anchoring early artificial intelligence within the masculinist, rationalist gaze of Western regimes of representation.

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, and reads her wider oeuvre as an early articulation of a cybernetic imagination — one that envisaged objects, events, ideas, and institutions as situated within systems of interrelation and exchange. It situates her work within a Californian milieu shaped by the proximity of Cold War computing industries to countercultural communities and art-making avant-gardes, drawing on the scholarship of Pamela M. Lee, W. Patrick McCray, Fred Turner, Zabet Patterson, N. Katherine Hayles, David Rodowick, and Homay King.

In doing so, the project 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 — a critical cultural ecology within which art histories themselves are authored.

Supervisors: Dr Johanna Gosse and Dr Lucy Bradnock.