Message Ritual: A Posthuman Account of Living with Lamp

TL;DR

This paper introduces Message Ritual, an AI-enabled lamp that reinterprets household conversations into poetry, exploring posthuman entanglement and boundary blurring between humans and machines through participatory living with the system.

Contribution

It presents a novel posthumanist approach and a system that enacts human-machine boundaries through poetic re-framing of daily conversations in domestic settings.

Findings

Participants engaged with the lamp over two weeks, experiencing new forms of memory and communication.

The system fostered a sense of entanglement and co-constitution between humans and technology.

Diffractive analysis revealed how the lamp becomes with participants in everyday life.

Abstract

As we become increasingly entangled with digital technologies, the boundary between human and machine is progressively blurring. Adopting a performative, posthumanist perspective resolves this ambiguity by proposing that such boundaries are not predetermined, rather they are enacted within a certain material configuration. Using this approach, dubbed `Entanglement HCI', this paper presents \emph{Message Ritual} -- a novel, integrated AI system that encourages the re-framing of memory through machine generated poetics. Embodied within a domestic table lamp, the system listens in on conversations occurring within the home, drawing out key topics and phrases of the day and reconstituting them through machine generated poetry, delivered to household members via SMS upon waking each morning. Participants across four households were asked to live with the lamp over a two week period. We present a diffractive analysis exploring how the lamp \emph{becomes with} participants and discuss the implications of this method for future HCI research.