Making of my Virtual Clone • Sam Rad (Samantha Radocchia)

Reflection • Conversations with Myself

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― 📕 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Working on a creative project with my studio @radicalnext.
A new immersive form of Metamedia storytelling. 

Part art installation, part social critique, part fireside chat, part satirical discourse, part something else.

A way to FEEL one of many Future potentialities.
One I personally do not align to, but alas, must explore.

As an attempt to grasp this bifurcation we are collectively experiencing between the organic and synthetic.

For now, while this project is the culmination of over a decade of research and experimentation, it is also very much under construction! 🚧

If you’d like to follow along for the adventure, you can find the tribe here on Instagram:

💪 @samrad.human • 🦾 @samrad.ai  

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Some context:

In early 2020, while CEO of a novel video communication platform pioneering a number of technologies in the domains of Artificial Intelligence, I created an AI clone of myself — my likeness, my voice, my thoughts.

Why did I do this, you ask?

The truth is, it’s easy to be filled with existential dread when contemplating the future — especially when it comes to AI.

And my way of sitting with the discomfort of this sort of uncertainty is to face it head on.

I’m an anthropologist. A humanist. A researcher that focuses on the impacts of technologies on humans and humanity. Yet, I prefer to live an analog existence — unplugged yet connected, living amongst the trees.

So why in the actual dystopian hell would I make a virtual clone of myself?

Because I’m a creative. A hacker. A builder. An artist. A storyteller. 

Because getting my hands dirty with the elegant mess of lived experience is how I learn. 

And because we are at a critical moment in human history. 

Now more than ever we must work together to preserve our cultures, our creativity, our sacred knowledge, our planet, our humanity.

And the only way I know how to educate about this is to “show” not “tell,” to provide an experience of this shift, rather than simply rattling off some stories and case studies on a stage. 

So, I transmuted my fear and created her — @SamRad.AI