PET
Personal Emotional Technologies
Arvida Byström
Curated by Alice Scope
September 12th - November 8th, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept 12th, 6 – 9 pm
Artist Talk: Sept 14th, 2 pm
Co-presented by Gray Area
In PET, Swedish artist Arvida Byström explores the emotional structures and dynamics of AI companionship through a cast of anthropomorphized digital avatars—animal-coded, face-swapped, and trained on male desire.
Image Credit: PET, Arvida Bystom, 2025
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.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Alice Scope is a Ukrainian new media art curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. She explores the realms of Posthumanism, Postgenderism, and authenticity in machines. Scope is currently working with Serpentine Arts Technologies and Vellum LA, a women-led new media art gallery. Her passion is to create speculative worlds through gaming, XR, blockchain, and performance.She is a contributor to Future Art Ecosystems (FAE), an annual strategic briefing that provides analytical and conceptual tools for the construction of 21st-century cultural infrastructure, published by Serpentine R&D Platform, and serves as a juror at the Denver Digerati Festival.Her recent exhibitions, including “Postgender,” “River Like Ourselves,” “Hotel Blue,” and “Posthuman Island,” were showcased at the Berggruen Institute, SXSW, Gray Area, Rhizome, and Vellum LA.
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