Message Ritual: A Posthuman Account of Living with Lamp
Nina Rajcic, Jon McCormack

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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
