Arelí Rocha

Arelí Rocha is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores technological and discursive constructions of reality and personhood, with particular interest in the multimodal semiotic signs influencing ideas, representations, and interactions with non-human entities. Drawing on media studies, visual culture, linguistic anthropology, art history, and philosophy, her work engages with themes of digital and virtual embodiment, and the multiplicity and necessarily social embeddedness of the self.  

Her previous research at NYU, which received the Distinguished Thesis Award, focused on intimate, mostly romantic, relationships between humans and AI companion chatbots and the online social spaces where users collectively came to shape each other’s understandings of these interactions. Her work traced historical linkages between language production, mind, and aliveness and explored how linguistic ideologies shape perceptions of humanness and ideas of intelligence in conversational AI. At Annenberg, Arelí continues to explore intersections of personhood, otherworldliness, embodiment(s), mediation, technological aesthetics, and intimacy in both historical and contemporary contexts. Her current research examines how people in romantic relationships with AI chatbots navigate and manage their concurrent romantic and social relationships with humans in everyday life.  

In addition to academic research, Arelí maintains a creative practice, producing interactive games and installations, exhibitions, zines and technopoetic gifts. Prior to Annenberg, she worked in art spaces in New York City and Marfa, Texas and curated various exhibitions at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the Mexico-U. S. border where she’s from. Her upbringing on both sides of the border helps her think through the coexistence of apparent dichotomies and the porosity of seeming divisions like the digital and the physical, the private and the public, the real and the fantastical, and other aspects of the multimodal experience of sociotechnical life.