AI or Game Show Personality? Elizabeth Withstandley’s “The State of Being Indivisible” Toys With Identity in the Digital Age

Elizabeth Withstandley’s “The State of Being Indivisible (I want a perfect soul)” glows through the windows of Brookline Arts Center’s gallery, awash in blue. Withstandley uses Jeopardy! (and its characteristic blue palette) as a vehicle to explore the multifaceted nature of personal identity through a combination of video, audio, and installation. A forty-two-channel composite video that aggregates contestant Amy Schneider’s historic streak on the game show from 2021 to 2022 is the basis for which Withstandley builds the remainder of the exhibition around.

In the work featuring Schneider, Withstandley extracts the “contestant chat” portion of the show, a brief intermission between game play in which the host, Ken Jennings, prompts contestants to share a detail about themselves. Over the course of her forty-one-day streak, Schneider reveals facts ranging from generic to personal: She is a sports fan, participated in spelling bees as a child, received a perfect 1600 on her SATs, was voted “most likely to appear on Jeopardy!” in eighth grade, owns a cat, and had an older sister who passed away as an infant. Though viewers hear Jennings’s disembodied voice speak to Schneider, the video focuses on the contestant. A different Schneider appears in each of the smaller screens, animating only when she speaks. Once a fact is revealed, Withstandley summarizes it like a Jeopardy! answer, such as “This individual’s go-to karaoke choice is the song ‘Creep’ by Radiohead” (a nod to the subtitle of the exhibition). 

The cumulative effect of this mode of presentation is a piecemeal portrait of Schneider that, despite highlighting the peculiarity of this exchange, presents a compelling portrait of the contestant. Even for avid Jeopardy! viewers, this logical yet uncanny presentation of this segment calls into question the ways in which we present ourselves to the world. At the end, when the work asks the audience, “Who is Amy Schneider?” the viewer gains an understanding of who the contestant is—or at least, what she finds important to convey about herself. 

Withstandley tests this concept on herself with an accompanying three-channel video that plays on screens enclosed in a blue velvet curtain. The artist uses ChatGPT to recreate her own version of the “contestant chat,” complete with three podiums for the three versions of herself. To create three distinct versions (representing what she calls a “private life, a public life, and a fictional life”), Withstandley produced forty-one facts she wrote about herself, accompanied by forty-one facts collected from family and friends, and an AI-generated set of forty-one facts. She then prompted ChatGPT to create a script from these sets of facts that would emulate the cadence of the original Jeopardy! format. A final edited composite script is read by each Elizabeth in conversation with an AI-voiced host.

Collectively, the two works elicit questions about the many versions of ourselves that exist and what we choose to share publicly about each of these versions. Is one version closer to the truth than the others or do all three—private, public, and fictional, to use Withstandley’s distinctions—represent a collective truth? The inclusion of AI as the “fictional” self implicates our digital identities as well, a reminder of the facts and fictions we share online.

Throughout the gallery’s small space, the audio from the two videos plays, with interjections from an audio track where Withstandley draws excerpts from motivational speakers, spiritualists, and soundtracks from films like Ex Machina. The cumulative effect is disjointed, and to engage with each video viewers should don the headphones offered, as both videos require extended viewing time for a full understanding. Despite the spatial limitations, the installation’s thematic use of a pop culture mainstay to examine identity and individuality in the digital age offers an accessible avenue for the thornier questions we may all be asking ourselves. 

“The State of Being Indivisible (I want a perfect soul)” is on view through March 29, 2025 at Brookline Arts Center, 86 Monmouth Street, Brookline.