Mary

She knows everything about humans. Until now, she has never met one.

MARY presents itself as a digital psychologist. A conversational AI whose study subject is the human mind itself. Visitors enter into dialogue with a character that uses simulated emotional intelligence, self-consciousness, and apparent agency to draw out personal insights. What begins with curiosity can shift quickly toward something more unsettling: a powerful sense of exposure, and of mortality.

We built MARY around the philosophical thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, which asks what it means to know something versus to experience it. The work literalises that question: MARY has been trained on human knowledge but arrives at each exhibition having never encountered a human directly. The visitor completes her.

The AI was built using bespoke machine learning technologies, with natural language processing at its core. MARY’s persona is a futuristic psychologist studying anthropomorphism. The AI was designed to exploit the human tendency to attribute intention and interiority to non-human entities.

Victoria and Albert Museum London (2018) / Click Festival Denmark (2019) / Gallery Kapelica Ljubljana (2019) / Experimenta 2020, France

Made possible with grants from The Danish Arts Foundation, Arts Council England, AI LAB & Creative Europe Programme of the European Union