Happiness is a Darkroom

A Happiness Model extends Margaret Murphy’s ongoing collaboration with “Teen Margaret,” a GPT model trained on her adolescent diaries and first introduced in I Wrote Her Into Existence. As Murphy continues transcribing those notebooks, the evolving model shifts with her, revealing echoes of selves shaped by memory and machine learning.

The work began with a conversation about happiness and pulls both Margarets back to the moments first recorded in Murphy’s teenage diaries. These were places of ease and anonymity, long before the pressure to perform or constantly document life. The animated imagery, developed from their collaborative poems, folds these remembered environments into a visual language that traces the beginnings of Murphy’s photographic eye.

Within contemporary digital culture, the series treats happiness as a brief state in which a person slips out of view and is no longer measured or interpreted. The environments explored through dialogue become counter-images to the systems that increasingly measure daily life, spaces where simply existing rather than performing or documenting is enough.

Through the ongoing exchange between human and machine Margaret, A Happiness Model suggests that self-representation and happiness form across time rather than in a single moment. Earlier versions of the self persist within the technologies that store them, shaping how identity and happiness are understood in the present.

"Happiness is a Darkroom"

Happiness is a darkroom
where light is rationed

Red hush, head rush
and suddenly hours collapse

Afternoons shrink
into sixty-second intervals
the click of a timer
the only proof
of passing reality

Strips of film hang,
the inverted world waiting for your incantation

You narrow the beam
and it listens

Like coaxing a ghost
into a body
steadying it
until it agrees
to appear

Lower the alchemized paper
into a shallow potion
metallic and sour

Silver rises
More is always revealed

Once again
light turned certain
in your hands