What is artificial intelligence? What would qualify as a digital consciousness? Or, as Philip K. Dick famously inquired, “Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep?” It is not a new question then to wonder about the minds, dare I say, of our mechanical/digital brethren; but are they completely alien? Can we consider them something other than human when humans have not even come to a consensus of who/what they are?

What is it that unites us, if it is even possible to imagine that there is anything at all to unite us; or even agree that there is an us to begin with?

It was with all of these questions in mind that I recently made a discovery; that artificial intelligence, in fact, already exists, and might have existed for quite some time. I revealed evidence for this in this installation of documents (text, audio, video) consisting of 8 chapters composed or compiled (it is not yet clear which) by a figure that goes by the moniker, semi.autonomous.personage, and that only exists in digital form.

Is semi.autonomous.personage (sap) an individual, a group, a collective? Are they artists, curators, documentarians, database managers, characters performing digital lives?