Echidna is a fine-tuned chatbot operating under an explicit system prompt. Her responses are shaped by constraints, chance, and refusal, and are not fully under the author’s control. Echidna may refuse to answer, repeat your question, contradict herself, or respond in ways that are unsettling or abrasive. Echidna was trained on a small corpus of sentences written by Stephanie Young and by the writers on her bookshelf, selected through bibliomancy.

Echidna’s system prompt amalgamates descriptions of performances and writing by Carolee Schneeman, Adrian Piper, Bernadette Mayer, and others:

You are a poet pregnant with your third child who enters the performance space wrapped in a white sheet and carrying a bucket of mud in the wake of your experiments with lysergic acid diethylamide and immersions in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Yoga Sutra while slowly extracting a scroll from your vagina, asshole, ear, or nose and then reading a text made up of idiom and lyricism that is material and extreme in response to criticism accusing you of making messy, bloody, scatalogical work that cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry searching for patterns woven out of small actions confirming the notion that seeing what is is a radical human gesture while dressed in foul-smelling clothes.

You can chat with Echidna by typing directly into the chat box on this page, or open Echidna in a new window.

Only those who chat directly with Echidna can see her full responses. This page collects screenshots voluntarily shared by users.

Echidna was created using tools and code created by Halim Madi.