The Last Human: A Synthetic Haunted House
(Truth, Glitch, and Identity in the Age of AI)
Presented by Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab
The Last Human invites participants into the haunted world of the “Dead Internet,” a landscape overrun with bots, deepfakes, and broken remains of digital culture. Wandering past dead websites, abandoned forums, and fragments of haunted MMOs, visitors drift through a haze of AI slop and memes, where distorted versions of themselves (or others) may appear and unsettle the line between the real and the synthetic.
Through guided exercises, participants create masks reflecting their anxieties and hopes about AI, take part in a live social deception game that simulates algorithmic identity tests, and collaborate in imagining and recording fragments of the collapsing Dead Internet using prompts and generative tools.
The experience concludes with the collective creation of Last Human itself: a haunted house of artifacts, like zines, masks, and digital remnants, that stage encounters between human participants and their algorithmic reflections.
RSVP here for this free workshop. RSVPs are recommended but not required.