Topographies of Artificial Desire (2023) is an interactive audiovisual installation that delves into the evolving relationship between humans, artificial intelligence, and virtual spaces. We invite participants to wander the fractured landscape of this nonrepresentational virtual world, accompanied by a slightly-malfunctioning virtual friend. Participants can interact conversationally with this AI model shaped by a small dataset of love letters and emotional dialog. Embedded within the terrain, text from the model's training data visibly mingles with conversations from past participants. Publically available training datasets, the language information from the internet used to create AI models, contain many flaws and biases. As such, this virtual entity tends to speak in both non-sequiturs and problematic statements. We leave the AI's output unfiltered to acknowledge this technology's numerous issues while leaving the strangeness and intimacy of one-on-one conversation intact. User input directly modifies the pastel landscape of Topographies, and the ever-changing environment dissolves entirely if the participant does not engage. The necessity of this interaction reflects the animating role humans play in our increasingly virtualized world –one where we are guided by the voices of close and yet distant entities.
