This practice-based research explores the entanglement of AI avatars, extractive economies, and artistic practice, critically examining digital identity as an ideological and material construct. AI avatars, positioned as ‘knowing machines,’ operate within systems of technological capitalism, perpetuating cycles of labour, surveillance, and resource extraction. Through performance, AI development, and expanded digital fabrication, this project interrogates the ecological and socio-political costs of digital infrastructures. Drawing on Kate Crawford’s critique of AI as a system of colonialism and Donna Haraway’s ‘informatics of domination,’ the research traces the hidden economies sustaining AI avatars. By overidentifying with these digital entities, the project highlights the contradictions within technological world-building, revealing the material and ideological undercurrents shaping human and non-human agency in the digital age.
