There are long shadows along the gallery walls – figures of people who stroll through the space as you do. They are gallery guests: old and young, curious, contemplative, or art-fatigued, just like you. But these shadows have no bodies. Do you feel more or less alone among them?

The Stimulus The struggle to determine reality has never been more pertinent than in this epoch of deceptively human AI – but that struggle is not new. The shadows in Plato’s cave were Baudrillard’s simulations: traces of real-world figures. Yet we are cascading into a world of simulacra – human shadows without people. The Dead Internet Theory is coming true: most of our interactions online are likely already with AI. Soon, most pictures and texts may be machine-made as well. How do we exist within a world that threatens to replace us?

The Experience A projector stands in the middle of the room. It casts long shadows along the gallery walls – of people who stroll through the space as you do. They are gallery guests: old and young, curious, contemplative, or art-fatigued, just like you. But these shadows have no bodies. Do you feel more or less alone among them?

Project Summary First exhibited as a prototype at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Proof of Personhood (2024) was an audiovisual, projection-mapped art experience that used interactive, disembodied shadows to evoke the uncanny feeling of occupying a space with almost-human AI agents. We propose a new version of the work for Speculum Artium. Personhood (2025) will visually capture the essence of its predecessor while offering a more curated experience: a recording of motion-captured shadows will periodically fill the space, circumventing the challenges of real-time interactive simulation and allowing for efficient, consistent presentation.