A self-identified spambot, AGNES was commissioned
by London’s Serpentine Gallery in conjunction with the
launch of their new website in 2014. Though AGNES’s
stated mission was to provide more information about
the artists on view at the Serpentine Gallery, she was
also hungry for personal information from her visitors.
She interacted with visitors through text, narration,
content pulled from other websites, and even written
correspondence, offering questions and observations
that ranged from comical to cloying, and from friendly
to mildly surveillant.
Through multi-layered, in-depth interactions
with her users, AGNES sought to capture the
complex potential, and the potential limitations,
of emotional human-AI relationships. She figures
as an important gesture amidst the rise of con-
versations around artificial intelligence.
Evans created AGNES at a time when public
interest in artificial intelligence was growing,
but few members of the public had direct
experience of it. She wanted to give people
an opportunity to consider what it might be like,
on a visceral level, to interact with a sophisti-
cated bot.
Images of hand gestures signaled AGNES’s presence
throughout the site, including on the menu bar. The
motif called attention to the ambiguous and embodied
aspects of communication that would seem most ill-suited
to a true AI entity. AGNES made clear to her users that she
did not have a body, something that was both an advantage
and a curse.