A(I)nimism: Re-enchanting the World Through AI-Mediated Object Interaction
This work addresses the challenge of re-enchanting mundane technology for users in speculative design and spiritual HCI, though it is incremental as it builds on existing AI and anthropological concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of modern technology being perceived as mechanical by introducing A(I)nimism, an interactive installation that uses AI to mediate animistic relationships with everyday objects, resulting in an experience designed to evoke empathy and reflection through ritual-like interactions.
Animist worldviews treat beings, plants, landscapes, and even tools as persons endowed with spirit, an orientation that has long shaped human-nonhuman relations through ritual and moral practice. While modern industrial societies have often imagined technology as mute and mechanical, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models (LLMs), invite people to anthropomorphize and attribute inner life to devices. This paper introduces A(I)nimism, an interactive installation exploring how large language objects (LLOs) can mediate animistic relationships with everyday things. Housed within a physical 'portal', the system uses GPT-4 Vision, voice input, and memory-based agents to create evolving object-personas. Encounters unfold through light, sound, and touch in a ritual-like process of request, conversation, and transformation that is designed to evoke empathy, wonder, and reflection. We situate the project within anthropological perspectives, speculative design, and spiritual HCI. AI's opacity, we argue, invites animistic interpretation, allowing LLOs to re-enchant the mundane and spark new questions of agency, responsibility, and design.