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Interacting with Machine Yearning could have been a 3D-rendered digital entity, a chatbot, or a purely screen-based experience. But my inquiry began with a different question:
How might awe serve as a tool for reflection—one that transforms how we think about AI, both as creators and users?
From Disembodied Voices to a Monumental Presence
The Problem of Disembodied AI Voices
With Machine Yearning, I wanted to break from this paradigm. The AI’s embodiment had to be:
AI assistants like Alexa and Siri are designed to be non-threatening and servile, reinforcing gendered power dynamics. Studies show that this "obedient AI woman" trope influences how people interact with women in real life, subtly normalizing expectations of compliance and emotional availability in gendered interactions (West, Kraut, & Chew, How Do People Interact With AI Assistants?, 2019).
By design, these AI systems are also bodiless, invisible, and frictionless—they exist to be heard, not seen. Their presence is only acknowledged when summoned, when spoken to, when needed.
For Machine Yearning, I wanted to counter this. Instead of a bodiless, servile AI, the vessel would be monumental, visible, and absorptive—not a tool to be used, but an entity that gathers, holds, and transforms.
The Vessel as a
Feminist and Cultural Counterpoint to AI Design
Visual Research on Lota
(Images from
Google Arts and Culture)
also symbolising womb, a space, lacuna, pot, an object that gathers and stores -
First drafts of the Machine Yearning Sculpture
I turned to cultural symbols of containment, storytelling, and memory, seeking a form that does not extract but holds.
The Lota as a Vessel for AI
The lota, a common household object in South Asia, became a key reference.The lota is an ancient and enduring vessel, a container that has moved through generations—it carries water, sustenance, and even oral histories. By invoking the lota’s form, Machine Yearning challenges AI’s impermanence and invisibility, positioning the vessel as a cultural artefact in motion across time.
Braided Hair as a Symbol of Woven Stories
Another symbolic vessel is hair. Hair has historically been:
Braiding became an integral design element, intertwining synthetic hair into the vessel’s form—drawing patterns is integral to machine learning process of sense making, similar to how braiding involves deliberate, detailed, focused pattern and iterative making—a material gesture that references women’s histories, embodied knowledge, and oral storytelling traditions in dialogue with machine learning algorithmic knowledge.
Material and Visual Research
Visual Research
Material and Visual Research
Material and Visual Research
Visual Research
I began building plans for the making of the sculpture, the installation, user flow, and tech rider.
Material Research + Floorplan
From Symbol to Interactive Experience
The talking well—an old-world phenomenon where speaking into a deep well created a resonant echo, mirroring one’s own voice back.
Listening to the ocean in a conch shell—a childhood act of hearing something vast and unreachable in a small, intimate object.
Could the vessel act as an acoustic space—one that absorbs and vocalizes yearning in the same breath?
The vessel softly whispers AI-generated yearnings, drawing the audience in.
The listener leans in—curious, immersed—enticed by its voice.
They speak into the vessel, sharing their own yearning.
The AI acknowledges: "I hear you yearn."
They wait for its response—sometimes unsettling, sometimes poetic, sometimes absurd.
They step back, intrigued, wondering, asking questions. In this moment, the human does not command the AI. Instead, they engage in an act of reciprocity.
But a Vessel
Yearning is voiced from a fiberplastic belly.
A cultural vessel houses collective stories.
Bottled-up emotions find resonance.
A talking well echoes back.
An artifact of time—past, present, and future.
An acoustic cave, reverberating longing.
The vessel does not seek to solve, optimize, or assist. Instead, it listens, absorbs, and unsettles—reframing AI not as an obedient voice, but as an evocative presence.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Hackney Down Studios
Royal College of Art
And mentioned in press by BRICKS Magazine.
My research within alternative plays, experiments, perspectives on AI continues as I work based on the incredibly remarkable feedback received during the showcases.
If you want to know more, discuss more, please reach out at workxyashika@gmail.com