Barbara T. Smith

A 1976 performance by American artist Barbara T. Smith (born 1931), I Am Abandoned featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Goya’s The Naked Maja, in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a clothed female model. This publication includes a full transcript of the "conversation" between the two programs, documentation and ephemera from the performance, and Smith’s reflections on the night. To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the critical and liberating potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Against today’s backdrop of AI, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape.

A pioneer of the performance art movement of the late 1960s, Southern California–based Barbara T. Smith (born 1931) has long produced work that explores the self, sexuality, gender roles and spiritual sustenance. While her performances have received critical attention, the objects Smith has made over nearly 60 years—many for, or as a result of, performances—are less known. These include her radical Xerox works, assemblages, sculptures, artist’s books, drawings, paintings, photographs and videos. Smith’s first ever comprehensive catalog is designed by Content Object (C/O). Featuring an illustrated chronology of Smith’s life and artwork compiled by curator Jenelle Porter, the catalog also includes essays by scholars Gloria Sutton, Catherine Taft and Pietro Rigolo, who elaborate upon Smith’s work as it relates to new technologies, ecofeminism and the archive, respectively.