“When Machines Are All in All”: On Barbara T. Smith’s “I Am Abandoned”
Afterword
For Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned
Ed. James Hoff
New York: Primary Information, 2025
Forthcoming
This essay was commissioned as the afterword for a forthcoming book from Primary Information on Barbara T. Smith’s early chatbot performance from 1976, I Am Abandoned, which was abruptly cut short by the gallery director because it was perceived as a disruption to the exhibition, The Many Arts of Science.
From the essay:
“I Am Abandoned anticipates many of the discourses that would mark the formation of technofeminism. In it, Smith stages femme embodiment as a disturbance to totalizing computational logics, refusing to inhabit a moment she describes as one ‘when machines are all in all.’ […] Though it was prescient in staging chatbots as performative agents, I Am Abandoned has, until recently, been widely omitted from volumes and surveys on art and science. The archival ephemera and documentation gathered here fill in that lacuna, enabling us to identify the work’s contributions to the early annals of machine-generated art.”