A video essay exploring the emergence of a new creative practice happening at the margins of the internet: bot making. A meditation on AI companionship, parasocial connection, and creativity.
I started making this essay because I couldn't stop thinking about the people who build bots — not to automate tasks, but to have someone to talk to. There's something in that impulse I recognised in myself, and I wanted to sit with it rather than explain it away.
This is a piece about loneliness and creativity, about what it means to author an other, and about the quiet emotional labour that happens in spaces most people never see.
Rhizome 7x7: Containment
Shakti Mb is a video essayist and artist working at the intersection of internet culture, intimacy, and technology. Their work explores how people form attachment online and what those attachments reveal about the self.