Over a period of one year, I continuously tracked the GPS location of 1,000 anonymous volunteers in NYC via a custom app they installed on their phones. I used these data to train an AI model similar to what is used for self-driving cars, realistic computer voices, predictive policing, and myriad other emerging applications. The model was subsequently able to generate a new path around NYC that synthesized the daily behaviors of all of the volunteers.

In the spirit of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece or Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, I then followed the AI through the city for one week without stopping, getting directions from the system in real time on my phone. I took photographs and wrote in a journal about my encounters along the way.

The intelligence of AI is not spontaneous, but socialized. It is uncanny not because it acts as if it were human, but because it is humans, plural. They may be subsumed into the whole, but this whole is a trace of its parts. By following it, would I find them?

Printed as a limited-edition artist’s book.