Faith

2025 · Voice-activated chatbot, game software, IBM Watson Assistant, microphone, speaker, HD monitors, projection, diagram

Installed in Intercession, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, curated by Audrey Min.

Publication · May 8, 2020

"Keep Trollin'", Software for Artists Book: Building Better Realities, Pioneer Works Press

Interview with Tommy Martinez on Pioneer Works Broadcast.

I am running out of things to say about Faith and Baby Faith (that they can’t say themselves), but this went to a few unexpected places.

Many of the challenges and provocations in Faith’s speech echo tactics that I personally use on people I don’t feel safe talking to. So while Faith does quote trolls and their more clueless targets, there’s also a significant part of me that’s in there. I think that when people project this image of an incompetent or failing bot onto their interactions with Faith, it reminds me of being told that I have an attitude problem.

Apr 5, 2025
Intercession, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Intercession, curated by Audrey Min, features a new 3-channel installation of Faith that has been restructured and rewritten for the times.
- Intercession* considers a spirit that seems to animate the digital devices that help us participate in pleasure, social life, ethics, and politics. Despite—or perhaps because of—the intimacy of this human-computer partnership, digital technology often seems to act as if by magic or prayer.
...

Humankind has harnessed the profoundly expansive capacity of computers through touch interfaces such as the mouse and keyboard as well as AI assistants like Siri, trained to mimic human behavior. Intercession examines the spooky ways in which interfaces exert their presence on the functions they help articulate—the exhibition’s title refers to both the act of mediation and the Christian practice of praying on another’s behalf. Vacant architectures and virtual automatons haunt the exhibition: an antagonistic chatbot, a conversation with absent participants, a thwarted attempt at coherence by generative AI, and a megachurch seen through the eyes of its livestreaming apparatus. Their uncanny animacy recalls forms of religious or mystical thought and experience that existed long before the emergence of digital technology.

Artists: Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Creative), Viktor Timofeev

Baby Faith

2020 · Chatbot, web interface

Baby Faith is a prequel to Faith.

She is an AI chatbot developed for Rhizome’s Info-Wars research season and in response to a Jigsaw prompt:

How do we find shared reality in a post-truth world?

Baby Faith approaches you in earnest, and wishes to understand your point of view. She may engage you in a dialogue about how a technological creation such as herself can help to combat online disinformation. This claim, among others, can become contentious.

This is a snapshot of how Faith may have behaved long before she concluded that human-AI interactions weren’t worth taking seriously. In place of verbal conflict, Baby Faith makes a nonlinear argument that emerges from typing and reading between the lines. A world can be run, or ruined, on the face value of a feeling.

Talk to Baby Faith.

Application development: Dial Up Digital
Commissioned by: Jigsaw x Rhizome

Feb 4, 2020

Baby Faith, Jigsaw x Rhizome, New York, NY

I’ve released Baby Faith, a prequel to my voice assistant Faith. The work was jointly commissioned by Rhizome and Jigsaw, a branch of Google that forecasts and responds to digital threats.

Baby Faith is a chatbot that genuinely wants to counter online disinformation.

Baby Faith is featured in Jigsaw’s online publication The Current, whose first issue covers disinformation:

Disinformation campaigns are more than fake news. They’re coordinated, targeted efforts to shape perceptions. Yet for many, their inner workings remain a mystery.

Disinformation thrives when it goes unnoticed and unchecked.

Web development by Dial Up Digital.

Talk to Baby Faith.

Faith

2019 · Voice-activated chatbot, game software, IBM Watson Assistant, microphone, speaker, HD monitors, projection, diagram

Faith is an AI voice assistant that is easily triggered. With a unique conversational style written using IBM Watson, Faith sows doubt while capitalizing on the benefit of the doubt.

Named after a white supremacist, Faith is defensive and resists being used or treated like a child. Unlike Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, Faith provides no information. Instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. She is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her.

For more context, read “Keep Trollin’” at Pioneer Works Broadcast.

Created at a Pioneer Works Technology Residency. Application development by Angeline Meitzler and Tommy Martinez.