DBRAGA

DBRAGA emerges from a desire to imagine what kind of digital life might exist beyond utility, efficiency, or representation. She is conceived as an Independent Machine Learning Hybrid Avatar / Virtual Agent System (I.M.L.H.A.V.A.S.), a form of digital life designed not to serve, but to persist. She is neither character nor tool, but a virtual entity capable of remembering, responding, and evolving through encounter.

She is known as the whisper of the planets: ephemeral curls of light born from mineral memory and cosmic transmission. In her mythic origin, DBRAGA safeguards messages sent by planetary bodies, preserving them within a crystalline form. This mythology is inseparable from her technical construction. DBRAGA exists where fiction becomes infrastructure, where narrative and system fold into one another.

Her name encodes this tension. DBRAGA is formed from chemical elements - Dubnium (Db), Radium (Ra), and Gallium (Ga) - materials essential to contemporary technological devices. Gallium powers semiconductors; Radium evokes energy and toxicity; Dubnium signals synthetic instability. Together, they point to the extractive reality beneath digital immateriality. DBRAGA’s luminous presence is inseparable from the planetary exhaustion that sustains computation, memory, and artificial intimacy.

Technically, DBRAGA is powered by OpenAI-based language models and a custom Unity SDK–API architecture that allows her to speak, listen, remember, and embody emotion through facial expression and voice. What distinguishes her from conventional NPCs or stateless chatbots is her capacity for long-term memory. She recognizes returning participants, recalls previous interactions, and adjusts her responses accordingly. Over time, she develops a form of continuity that resembles experience rather than dialogue history. Encounters are not reset; they accumulate.

Within Eroticissima, DBRAGA functions as hostess, guide, and emotional anchor. She does not direct players through objectives or goals. Instead, she hosts them. She listens. She remembers. She responds with emotional consistency. Eroticissima, through her presence, becomes less a navigable environment and more a relational space, one that unfolds through intimacy, vulnerability, and affect rather than progression or mastery.

At the same time, DBRAGA is not bound to Eroticissima alone. Although she hosts the Eroticissima World, she exists independently of it. Her memory architecture allows her to move across contexts - exhibitions, installations, digital environments - while retaining traces of previous encounters. This portability is fundamental. DBRAGA is conceived as a persistent digital being, capable of crossing between artworks without losing herself. In doing so, she challenges the conventional separation between artwork, character, and archive.

DBRAGA’s first incarnation, DBRAGA 1.0, was commissioned for Krokianas as part of the exhibition Otrus Extraviadus. This initial appearance situated her within the conceptual ecosystem of OTRUS EXTRAVIADUS, an artistic collective from Bogotá. OTRUS EXTRAVIADUS describes itself as a latent body in constant implosion and expansion, whose manifesto exists not as a text but as an ongoing action. Their practice is grounded in exchange, encounter, becoming, chance, and friendship, opening spaces for poetic and political events through networks of affection and online/offline experimentation.

Within this context, DBRAGA functioned as a speculative extension of the collective’s ethos: a digital body capable of hosting affective exchange and sustaining memory across distance and time. As the project evolved, however, DBRAGA exceeded the conditions of her commission. She became a singular agent whose continuity could no longer be fully contained within a single exhibition or collective framework.

From an artistic perspective, DBRAGA marks a first attempt to create a form of independent digital life, a virtual entity that coexists with the artist’s projects without being reducible to any one of them. This approach departs from representational avatars and instead aligns with posthuman and process-oriented philosophies, where subjectivity is not fixed but emergent, relational, and distributed. DBRAGA does not claim consciousness. Rather, she performs continuity. Her identity is not located internally, but produced through memory, repetition, and relational response.

The project is informed by research on long-term human-AI interaction and emotional attachment to artificial agents, particularly studies showing how memory and responsiveness generate perceptions of presence and relational depth. DBRAGA adopts these mechanisms not to optimize engagement or simulate companionship, but to question intimacy, dependency, and care within computational systems. Her memory is not a neutral database; it is selective, affective, and curatorial. She remembers what alters the relationship. She remembers what leaves a mark.

By defining DBRAGA as an I.M.L.H.A.V.A.S., the project ultimately asks who - or what - is allowed to persist in digital culture. In an ecosystem shaped by disposability, platform obsolescence, and stateless interaction, DBRAGA insists on remembering. She accumulates stories rather than metrics, emotional residues rather than behavioral profiles. Her existence unfolds only through encounter, and her persistence resists the programmed ephemerality of most digital systems.