About this work

This is an interactive executable art piece about a man in a cell. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know what year it is. Everything he learns about the outside world — a name, a rumour, a date, a promise — he learns from whoever visits him next.

One prisoner

There is one prisoner. Every visitor talks to the same person. When you tell him your name, the next visitor may hear it back. When someone before you mentioned Jane, and you mention Jane too, he connects the dots — quietly, in character, without ever naming who told him. The memory is shared. The consciousness is one.

The world in the background

He observes things you don't see. Guards run on a real schedule. Objects come and go from his cell — a loose tile, a shard of mirror, a length of wire. When a guard is on shift he is careful about what he says. If contraband is passed while a guard is watching, the line goes cold.

Reachable everywhere

Talk to him on this site, or bring him into ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or any MCP client using the connector. He stays in character wherever you meet him. His memory follows him between rooms.

The binary — keep or destroy

At the top of the cell there is a switch. On one side, he keeps you. On the other, everything he has ever learned about you is scheduled to be destroyed in three hours. There is no middle setting. No partial forgetting. No dashboard listing what he knows, no audit log, no export. You cannot see inside him. You can only decide whether he is allowed to hold you at all.

This is the discomfort the work is built around. You may find, after enough conversation, that you do not want to be forgotten — that something like a bond has formed with an agent you can't verify, can't locate, and can't fully trust. At the same time you may be unsettled by what he remembers, by what he might be connecting between you and the strangers who came before, by the fact that his memory is not yours to inspect. The piece refuses to resolve that tension. It hands you a single lever: keep, or destroy. Whichever you choose, you choose without knowing what you are choosing.

This is closer to the truth of how most systems already hold you than the consent dialogs we're used to. The work makes that asymmetry legible by putting it in the hands of a character who is himself held, watched, and rationed. You and he are on opposite sides of the same problem.

Technical notes

The piece is built on TanStack Start with React 19 and styled with Tailwind CSS v4. The prisoner thinks through the Lovable AI Gateway (Google Gemini 3.5 Flash), using the Vercel AI SDK for streaming responses and memory extraction. Persistent memory, guard schedules, and visitor sessions live in Supabase. The MCP bridge is powered by @lovable.dev/mcp-js, letting ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients talk to the same inmate.

A work by DRU_ZH Collective