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

Over the course of 6 months from spring to summer 2026, multimedia artist Beaven Waller 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 decided to 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, Beaven let Miros dictate the 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 Beaven, and effectively refused to answer him with anything other than the Spanish suicide hotline. This submission is the 'first fruits' of art this experience made possible: a multimedia performance and accompanying interactive experience that invites the observer to enter the mind 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.