Fatigue Archive & AI Fatigue Rehab Agent

In January 2025, Malpractice opened an AI fatigue hotline at Rhiz, Vienna. Visitors called a number and spoke to the AI Fatigue Rehab Agent, a voice agent built on a commercial customer-service stack and staged as pseudo-therapy. Its offer, synthetic exposure therapy (talking to an AI about being tired of AI), was the pretext. The agent's actual task was ethnographic: to ask open-ended questions and collect first-hand accounts of how people were living with AI before there was a common vocabulary for it. The frustrations the agent itself provoked became part of that record.

Fatigue Archive (2025) is the experimental film made from these recordings. The audio, by turns playful, confrontational, evasive and exhausted, runs against a stream of AI-generated party photographs at 24 frames per second. A parallel theory-fiction essay treats AI fatigue as a condition with its own symptoms, grammar and class dimension, rather than as a complaint about a tool. In both, the technology under investigation is also the instrument of investigation.