Happiness is Airplane Mode

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 Airplane Mode"

happiness is airplane mode
not because the world stops
but because it keeps going
without us

houses shrink into squares
roads into lines
everything below
small enough

the day continues
somewhere else
voices carry on
without us

the screen goes dark
but nothing disappears
it just quiets
into scale

inside the cabin
the engine hum steadies
like breath

someone else is flying
and silence
is not a problem to solve

thoughts float alongside the clouds
effort is no longer the price of motion

midair
buffered
safe to drift