24/05/2025
Artificial Intimacies - Last days!! 💓
House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic
The term artificial in the title refers not only to AI-driven technologies that interact with, simulate, or even exploit human desires for friendship, intimacy, love and s*x, but also evokes its Latin root, artificium in its sens of clever means of cunning and deception designed to create illusions and disguise reality.
Intimacy and love are traditionally built through iterative, day-to-day interactions: mutual attention, generosity, and emotional sharing. Romance scammers have long demonstrated how easily this dynamic can be emulated. Now, algorithmic processes can do it too, thanks to the continuous perfection of natural language processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs).
What does the intersection of human desires and machine-driven interactions reveal about the evolving dynamics of love, companionship, and emotional vulnerabilities in a world increasingly shaped by technology? How does this phenomenon sharpen our understanding of empathy, kinship, and emotional dependence in the age of AI?
The exhibition “Artificial Intimacies” I curated at House of Arts in Brno examines these processes through four interconnected conceptual axes:
Sycophancy & Narcissism, Deception & Manipulation, Cuteness & Gamification, Violence & Control.
Artists:
Ed Fornelies
Aurora Mititelu
Valentina Peri
Inès Sieulle
The exhibition follows the thematic cycle “Your Addiction is The Message” initiated by Barbora Trnková .trn at G99.
Photos Eva Rybářová, Barbora Trnková and me
