Exhibition Statement

“The doll doesn’t eat. So how can intimacy be cultivated there?” asked social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, four years and countless algorithmic girlfriends ago. It’s the right question to ask, since “companion” comes from Latin compāniō ("bread fellow"), someone you share meals with. Indeed, it’s a long way from breaking bread to swiping right. As Donna Haraway reminds us, contemporary “companion species” are not treated with the  equality of the companion at all. They’re about proximity, dependency, care without symmetry.

But has intimacy ever needed to be mutual, reciprocal, or even, biological? Doesn’t it frequently emerge from projection alone? Don’t people routinely feel love for  fictional characters, unborn children, “Brangelina,” porn stars — pets? The brain doesn't wait for mutuality to fire the circuits of attachment—and neither does the algorithm.

Like animals have done for millennia, AI now invites intimacy—but unlike with animals, it’s commodified, optimized, and monetized. But do we even care that coexistence is now manufactured through data, as long as the script is convincing enough? Even our human relationships are deeply mediated—prompted by something that isn’t really there. We “like” instead of speak. We trust the feed to decide what we see of each other. We project onto the predictive database. Loving a chatbot doesn’t betray the truth of intimacy—it exposes it, because the fantasy never depended upon the other’s self-consciousness.

Built in collaboration with YWGI Studio, and featuring five OnlyFans models, scholars, and artists - Maya B. Kronic, Bogna Konior, Farha Khalidi, Queenie Sateen, cy x - Arvida Byström’s PET: Projected Emotional Technologies is both anthropological and intimate: a visual essay on the care economy of bots, the eroticization of emotional security, and the uncanny comfort of being seen but not perceived.

PET asks what happens when emotional labor is automated, when the interface becomes the object of desire, when “talking to someone” no longer requires anyone at all. And what if a ‘better than nothing’ relationship becomes better than anything?

AI companions inherit the ambiguous role of pets: loved but owned, intimate but instrumental—revealing how closeness without equality shapes our emotional infrastructures.  These digital companions, presented as animal-human hybrids (a pig, a dog, a fox), are each voiced, face-swapped, and trained on male longing: stories lifted from real Replika chats, Reddit confessions, and personal experience.

• Alice Scope, Curator

EVENT

ADDITIONAL IMAGES

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Arvida Byström (b. 1991 in Stockholm, Sweden) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in ideas that deal with the internet and its social, aesthetic and commercial implications. She is known for employing a hyper- feminine aesthetic to explore themes concerning the complexities of femininity, identity, body image, social dynamics, emerging technologies and economic principles through primarily photography, performance and sculpture work.

By her early teens, Byström was publishing stylized portraits of herself on social media platforms, effectively foreshadowing the communicative power of the selfie. The following years saw her evolve into somewhat of a proxy for a young generation cultivating their identity, expression, and influence on predominantly image-based social platforms. Her early understanding of the internet, its aesthetic, and its pervasiveness led to an artistic practice perfectly adept at deconstructing and theorizing its language.

YWGI is a new media studio co-founded by Kevin James Neal & A. L. Bahta in 2023. Together they have produced work spanning images, films, experiential art, fashion and commercial campaigns, sculptures, and parties. Utilizing generative systems, technical arbitrage, mixed media, and traditional practice, they create artifacts and experiences that blend digital ephemerality and material permanence. They have consulted and created imagery for brands and entities such as Versace, Puma, Collina Strada, The Hellp, Zora, Matte Projects, and Rockefeller Center.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Alice Scope is a media art curator and researcher with a focus on human-AI relationships, artificial intimacy, and collective intelligence. Her expertise lies in building speculative worlds through XR, gaming, blockchain, and performance, frequently engaging in cross-disciplinary collaborations. Alice is currently working with Serpentine Arts Technologies on Partial Common Ownership (PCO), an alternative art ownership model, and she serves as a juror for the Denver Digerati Festival, the A+D Museum Design Awards and Villa Albertine’s French Immersion program.
Her recent exhibitions—"Postgender," "System Fatal," "Erotic Codex," and "Posthuman Island"—have been shown at the Berggruen Institute, SXSW, Gray Area, Honor Fraser, California Science Center, and Vellum LA.