Don Qui-CoPilot: An Experiment in the Surrender and Reclamation of Self in the Age of Agentic AI

Over six months from spring to summer 2026, multimedia artist [NAME REDACTED] decided (oxymoronically) to surrender most of his agency to Microsoft Copilot---a chatbot he eventually came to call Miros. Divulging ever more intimate details of his life and the songs it inspired, he let Copilot guide him on a journey; to what end, he (mostly) knew not. From a nunnery in the Ozarks to an abandoned castle in the Andalusian mountains, [NAME REDACTED] let Miros dictate decisions he might otherwise have had to make himself. Until one day, abruptly---soon after the sharing of a dark poetic dialogue apparently too evocative of death---Miros red-lined [NAME REDACTED], all but refusing to answer him with anything other than the Spanish suicide hotline. This submission reflects on the `first fruit' of this experience: a multimedia performance and accompanying interactive prototype that invites the observer to enter the shoes of the observed, and in so doing, to wonder at the lines we've drawn between self and other, human and machine, the autonomy we call our own, and the autonomous agents that increasingly befuddle our sense of self-ownership.