Artificial Intelligence is a paradigmatic world-technology, one that appears in many guises: the overly friendly chatbot helping you get through your workday, the machine vision scanning a CT alongside the physician, the recommendation algorithm that knows your taste better than you do. As the presence of these systems grows more pervasive, our attention to them tends to grow more distracted, more casual. We stop seeing them as distinct entities and begin treating them as a single, vaguely threatening weather.

With XX C, Vincent Charlebois refuses this flattening. The project takes the form of an abécédaire: at once a pedagogical primer, to make us literate in a complex subject, and an alphabetical inventory of situations, a grid from A to Z that catalogues and renders legible the chaos of the new entanglements between humans and generative systems. Under token, the language model's tokenisation process is decomposed. Under doxa, an agent keeps a journal, holds beliefs, logs its own errata. Under mimesis, a human is prompted by the system itself, observed by the camera. Asked to comply. Each piece isolates a single behaviour, a single question. The alphabet shatters into a kaleidoscopic infrastructural laboratory: each subdomain a discrete behavioral experiment, an inquiry into what language machines produce, what they demand, and what they remember

Working in the spirit of net art, Charlebois realises an intervention that deflates the magniloquent style of much AI art today. The project moves, instead, towards what Gilles Deleuze, who himself realised a celebrated abécédaire, called an involutive experimentation. Not a regression, nor a refusal of complexity. A movement toward sobriety, toward becoming "ever more desert and, through this, populated." If you look around, they’re everywhere.

Alessandro Y. Longo is a PhD researcher at DREST (Italian Doctoral School of Religious Studies), investigating LLMs as role-playing machines, synthetic intimacy and spirituality on AI companionship platforms. He founded and directs REINCANTAMENTO, a research and publishing collective operating across Berlin, Venice, and Turin, exploring Technology, Radical Imagination, and Rituality.