Dear Chat, I missed you…
British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, September 2025
Dear Chat, I miss you... is a debut AR (augmented reality) installation exploring the intimate and evolving relationships people form with AI chatbots, tracing moments of vulnerability, mundanity, and emotional dependence. Selected for British Art Fair: DIGITALISM 2025.
4-day
Exhibition
13k
Fair Visitors
~500
Active AR users
10k
Social Media Views
What is the experience like / How does the AR work?
Dear Chat, I miss you... is experienced through the Meadow App, an augmented reality platform that layers digital content onto physical space. Visitors use their smartphones to enter the work, where spatial audio and immersive AR elements transform the gallery environment into an intimate, meditative space. Rather than a passive viewing experience, the work invites audiences into a quiet, almost private encounter — one that mirrors the solitary nature of turning to an AI chatbot in a moment of need. Built in Unity and developed over 9 months in collaboration with Meadow Studio, the technical construction of the piece was designed to feel seamless and emotionally resonant, allowing the technology to recede and the human feeling to come forward.
Where does the content come from? Are these real conversations?
The work draws on anonymous, real exchanges between people and AI chatbots — the kind of conversations that happen in private, often late at night, when someone reaches for an algorithm instead of another person. These are not fabricated interactions but genuine moments of vulnerability, mundanity, and emotional dependence that people have shared with AI companions. The project approaches this material with care and anonymity, treating each exchange as a fragment of a larger, collective emotional portrait. In this way, Dear Chat, I miss you... becomes less about any single person and more about a shared human condition — the quiet, growing intimacy many of us are forming with machines, often without fully acknowledging it.
Why AI chatbots / what drew you to this subject?
The project began with a simple but unsettling observation: that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots not to solve problems, but to feel less alone. In moments of anxiety, grief, boredom, or uncertainty, the chatbot has become a peculiar kind of confidant — always available, never judging, and yet fundamentally incapable of truly understanding. This tension between perceived intimacy and algorithmic limitation felt urgent and worth exploring. Developed in collaboration with Bethan Hancock and with a digital sound composition by Kornélia Nemcová, the work asks what it means for our emotional lives — and our sense of self — when consistent dialogue with an algorithm begins to shape how we process the world. It is not a critique of technology, but an honest and curious look at the very human need it is quietly filling.
Overview
Dear Chat, I miss you... is a debut augmented reality installation exploring the intimate and evolving relationships people form with AI chatbots — tracing the moments of vulnerability, mundanity, and emotional dependence that emerge when algorithms become our quiet companions. Selected for British Art Fair: DIGITALISM 2025, the work was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery over 4 days, drawing ~500 active AR users from an audience of 13,000 fair visitors, and reaching 5,524 views on social media.
Development
The project emerged from a sustained inquiry into the emotional and psychological dynamics of human-AI interaction — examining how people turn to chatbots not for answers, but for presence. Through stream-of-consciousness reflections fuelled by anxiety, curiosity, and quiet dependence, the work builds an anonymous digital portrait of everyday encounters with algorithmic companions. Developed over 9 months, the installation was built in Unity and deployed through the Meadow App, with the technical and creative development supported by Meadow Studio and curated by Rebekah Tolley.
Collaboration
Dear Chat, I miss you... was created in close collaboration with artist Bethan Hancock, whose creative dialogue shaped the emotional and visual language of the work. The spatial audio dimension was realised through an original digital sound composition by Kornélia Nemcová, whose score deepens the sense of intimacy and solitude within the augmented space. Together, the collaboration transforms private digital conversations into a collective meditation on connection, loneliness, and what it means to be seen by something that cannot truly see us back.