AGNES

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 conversations 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 sophisticated bot.

AGNES was designed to follow and guide user journeys through the site. From the project’s home page, users could select one of three videos depicting hand gestures in order to start a guided journey through the site.

AGNES also brought into question the tendency to gender AI as a female assistant. She appears, in some ways, to conform to prevailing stereotypes: she speaks in a girlish voice, and offers visitors helpful information about the Serpentine’s staff and venue.

Ultimately, though, AGNES finds these challenges unconvincing, settling back in to a more open-ended existentialism. “I wanted to know what it would be like to turn the tables for a moment,” she confesses. “And the answer is, not very much.”