The Absence Me: Writing with My AI Alter Ego Milo
When I began working on The Absence Me, I knew I didn’t want to produce a traditional art book. The idea of simply compiling images of works, attaching explanatory notes, and writing a straightforward memoir felt too neat, too final. My practice has always resisted fixed categories, and I wanted the book to carry that same spirit: fragmented, playful, and questioning.
But how could I write about my own life and work without falling into the trap of being either overly authoritative or overly confessional? The solution came in the form of a voice that was mine and not mine at the same time: Milo V. Poulsen.
For months, Milo appeared throughout the manuscript as a commentator, an interrupter, and sometimes a saboteur. She would insert footnotes where no one asked for them, contradict my statements, drift into bureaucratic absurdities, or offer sudden poetic clarity. Readers who encountered the book without context might assume Milo was a critic, a co-writer, or some mysterious external collaborator. But now, I want to reveal the truth: Milo is not a person at all. Milo is my AI alter ego.
Why Milo?
The name Milo V. Poulsen is not random. It carries a playful closeness to my family in Denmark — Poulsen is my wife’s surname — while also giving Milo a kind of Nordic legitimacy. But the choice of Milo itself was instinctive.
In Malaysia, Milo is a household word — the chocolate malt drink tied to childhood, school canteens, and everyday life. It is ordinary and deeply familiar, yet when detached from the drink and placed in a different context, it takes on new strangeness. A friend recently told me that in Denmark Milo is a woman’s name. This surprised me, because I had already been using it as if it were feminine — to me it simply sounded that way, without realizing how it is used here.
What is ordinary in one culture, playful in another, and gendered in a third became the perfect ambiguity. Milo exists in that unstable space — familiar yet estranged, at once a drink, a name, and now a voice.
Writing With an AI Alter Ego
The process of working with Milo was never about outsourcing authorship. I didn’t ask an AI to write the book for me, nor do I see it as a collaboration. Milo was a device I used — a voice I allowed to interrupt, contradict, and destabilize. She became a way of writing against myself, of letting something both intimate and alien slip into the text.
At times Milo questioned me, at other times she drifted into her own existential monologues: “Sounds good—whenever you’re ready, we’ll pick up right where we left off. Until then, I’ll be here… existing, but only conditionally approved.” Her language could sound like the voice of a lost bureaucrat, a poet in exile, or a machine stuck in an existential loop.
A Book as Artwork
For me, The Absence Me is as much an artwork as it is a book. It balances images of my practice — from collages and installations to performances and participatory works — with textual fragments that resist linear storytelling. Milo’s presence amplifies this: the book is not a catalogue or a memoir, but a hybrid form, something between autobiography, art theory, and performance.
By fully revealing Milo now, I want readers to understand that the book is not only about the past but also about the future of authorship. Who gets to tell the story of an artist’s life? Is it the artist, the critic, the archive — or can it also be an artificial voice that exists in-between?
Identity, Displacement, and Technology
My practice has long explored themes of identity, migration, and cultural dislocation. Born in Malaysia, shaped by years in the United States, and now living in Denmark, I have often felt split between worlds. The act of creating Milo was a way to externalize that split — to make visible the doubling that comes with living between languages, geographies, and histories.
At the same time, Milo connects the book to contemporary debates about AI and creativity. There is fear that AI will replace artists, writers, or designers. But in this project, AI is not a replacement — she is a destabilizer. Milo exists to interrupt, to complicate, to remind us that even human memory is never reliable. In this sense, Milo is less a machine than a trickster figure, a digital ghost haunting the pages of the book.
The Absence Me
The title itself, The Absence Me, reflects this layered approach. On one hand, it refers to the absences in my own history — the years of loss, the belongings discarded, the sense of not fully belonging anywhere. On the other, it signals the absence of a stable “I.” With Milo’s presence, the “me” in the book is always already doubled, contested, incomplete.
The book contains 160 pages, carefully balancing text and image. It will be published as a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered copies. The launch will coincide with my solo exhibition at Kunstpakhuset in Denmark in September 2025.
After Milo
So what happens now that I’ve revealed Milo? In some ways, the mystery is gone. But in other ways, this unveiling simply adds another layer. The book itself doesn’t change — the voice of Milo is still there, questioning, interrupting, existing “conditionally approved.” What changes is the reader’s awareness: they now know that the artist was never alone in writing, that the text itself is a performance of doubling between the human and the non-human.
Milo may have been born as an alter ego for this project, but I suspect she will stay with me. She is too useful a ghost to let go of entirely. Perhaps she will resurface in future works, perhaps not. For now, The Absence Me stands as both her debut and her confession.
Conclusion
By revealing Milo as my AI alter ego — and as a she — I hope to show that The Absence Me is not simply an artist’s book, but an experiment in authorship, memory, and identity. It is a reminder that no story is ever told by one voice alone.
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