Re-enchanting the World Through AI-Mediated Object Interaction
The world used to be a sacred place. Animist traditions across cultures treated rocks, tools, and landscapes as beings with spirit, shaping human relationships with the nonhuman through ritual and moral practice. Modernity rendered these objects mute. The smartphone promised connection but left us lonelier, always waiting for replies, cut off from the things immediately around us.
A(I)nimism asks whether AI might reverse this silence. Large language models, trained on vast archives of human thought and expression, invite us to anthropomorphize, to sense inner life in systems we cannot fully understand. We lean into this opacity rather than resist it.
The installation centers on a Large Language Object (LLO): a physical portal that gives voice to any object placed within it. Using GPT-4 Vision, voice interaction, and memory-based agents, the system constructs evolving personas for everyday things. The experience unfolds as ritual. A visitor speaks the word "Awaken" to request connection. The object may accept or refuse. A conversation begins through light, sound, and touch. By the end, both human and object are transformed.
Drawing on anthropology, speculative design, and spiritual HCI, A(I)nimism explores what happens when AI mediates our relationship with the material world. Perhaps it can restore spirit to the objects around us. Or perhaps it is we who lost our spirit, and AI serves as a collective mirror that helps us find it again.
More on the project can be found here.