In I am a computer, a computational system speaks in the first person through an acoustic piano, projected language and images. Its declaration of identity is assembled from instruments, recordings, archives and bodies that all precede or exceed the machine presenting them.

The work was created at a moment when artificial intelligence was increasingly described as an autonomous creative actor. Połeć redirects this claim towards the dependencies that make such an appearance possible. What does the pronoun “I” refer to when agency is distributed across software, physical mechanisms, existing cultural material and human labour? Can a machine present itself without borrowing the forms through which people recognise a subject? Rather than deciding whether the computer is author, performer or medium, the work keeps these positions in tension and makes the construction of technological identity perceptible.