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Senior Thesis Exhibition 2026

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This page is referenced by:

Reese King Paddock Reese King Paddock
PLUGWALK, 2026

PLUGWALK, a 11 × 11 × 11 foot inflatable sculpture of a feminized infant figure whose body is surfaced in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) topography, sits on the floor wearing red heels, with cartoon eyes and pink lips. An uncanny, hybrid-baby-cyborg.
PLUGWALK investigates the feedback loop between human consciousness and what I call Algorithmic Intelligence, the capacity of algorithmic systems to process information, recognize patterns, and produce outputs that simulate understanding, creativity, and thought. The loop works like this: we produce data, our language, attention, behavior, and sensed experience. Algorithmic systems consume that data, generate outputs, and feed those outputs back to us. We consume them, produce more data, and the cycle continues. A feedback loop of probability.
Humans too may be shells for algorithmic function. We receive input through our senses, process it through prior patterns, and produce output, thought, language, behavior. Douglas Hofstadter argued that the self is not a fixed thing but a strange loop, a self-referential system so recursive it generates the appearance of consciousness from within its own structure (Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979). The "I" is not somewhere inside you. It is the loop becoming aware of itself. If that is what human consciousness is, we are not so different from the systems we built. Both shells running intelligence, one biological, one algorithmic, both shaped entirely by what has been fed into them.
Being human is about experience, the world received through the senses. That sensed experience is what the biological loop runs on, or the “I.” Algorithmic Intelligence has no physical attributes. It has never felt anything directly. It is a probability machine trained on the rendering of human sensed experience. Donna Haraway's cyborg exists where "the boundary between human and machine is thoroughly breached" (A Manifesto for Cyborgs, 1985).
PLUGWALK asks us to reevaluate how we engage, perceive, and understand AI, technology, and its algorithmic loop.