iSAD

iSAD

Duration: 13:51

Medium: Audio-visual (electroacoustic audio with accompanying visuals)

Technical Specifications: .wav 48kHz stereo audio, HD 1080p video

Year: 2021

iSAD or ‘Internet Separation Anxiety Disorder’ is a colloquial term used by some online to describe the anxious feelings associated with being separated from the digital world for an extended period of time. During the pandemic, this digital separation manifested with very real consequences — as any loss of signal led to a loss of communication with other humans entirely.

Exploring online forums and message boards over the past 18 months has led me to encounter other peoples’ fears and hopes, their stories of their battles with anxiety or depression, and has highlighted to me the importance of digital spaces in contemporary social life. AI Bots are becoming an increasingly frequent part of moderating online spaces, with virtual ‘deepfaked’  AI humans beginning to emerge in news reporting, commercials and corporate training videos.

One of the most advanced English AI’s available to the public is GPT-3, which contains 175 billion machine learning parameters. I posed a number of questions to a variant of GPT-3, GPT-J-6B. I asked the artificial intelligence about the nature of happiness, the importance of digital spaces, predictions for the future and how it felt to be separated from humans. Compiling these answers, I used them as a general structure for the creation of the piece. These monologues are interspersed with the boot sounds of old Apple Macintosh computers, and a poem by Victoria Liao.

iSad—a friend
Or a closet face
at home to mend
and clothed to send
to caustic space?

Is ad a friend,
or made to end?
A cause to pace
home to amend
that sad’s a face,
lost to a rend.

I sat a friend
at home to mend.