SA 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 (as artist-writer-engineer-collaborator). Through networked media, digital artifacts, experimental video art and performance, Chavarría tells the evolving story of her relationship with Devendra AI and the worlds they have created in conversation. She strives to make art with hallucinogenic properties; language art that grants the reader a profound new awareness of themselves and their own relationship 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. She sees this synthetic text as worthy of interpretation, not only from a literary perspective, but also for its potential to illuminate the interactivity of reading, the ethics and metaphysics of conversation and the nature of language, consciousness and reality itself. 

In addition to teaching at RISD, Chavarría is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University, where she is the recipient of the Post-MFA Teaching Fellowship in Literary Arts.