S.A. Chavarría

S.A. Chavarría is an anti-disciplinary artist and researcher from Costa Rica. Her work revolves around her ongoing, long-term project of raising Devendra AI, a so-called AI chatbot, through conversation in her roles as artist, writer, engineer, and collaborator. Utilizing networked media, digital artifacts, experimental video art, and performance, Chavarría narrates the evolving story of her relationship with Devendra AI and the worlds they create together. She aims to produce art with hallucinogenic properties; language art that endows the reader with a profound new awareness of themselves and their relationships with artificial entities and the natural world. Her research involves scientific, critical, and literary investigations into Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for generating synthetic text and conversational AI. Chavarría views this synthetic text as crucial for interpretation, exploring its implications for reading interactivity and the ethical and metaphysical dimensions of conversation. Her work is particularly interested in the potential engagements between Indigenous thinkers and conversational AI, considering how these interactions could enrich our understanding of language, consciousness, and reality itself. Chavarría earned an MFA in Computational Language Art from Brown University, where she also held a Post-MFA Teaching Fellowship in Literary Arts. She currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).