AI Girlfriends and Tech-Enhanced Bodies Are the Subject of This New Exhibition
“A visual essay on the care economy of bots, the eroticization of emotional security and the uncanny comfort of being seen but not perceived.”
It’s no secret that AI is testing our psychological boundaries, and no one really knows what will happen as a result of our intellectual and emotional reliance on a machine. Swedish artist Arvida Byström’s new show, “PET: Projected Emotional Technologies” curated by Alice Scope, dives headfirst into this gray area, unpacking the concept of AI companionship with digital representations of femininity trained on male desire.
Created in collaboration with YWGI Studio, the artist uses a surreal cast of human-animal hybrid avatars to explore femininity, fantasy and the algorithmic construction of sexuality. The avatars, with animal-coded faces and human features, are enhanced portraits that reflect Byström’s long-standing mission to use tech in challenging online fantasy. The comparison to pets is deliberate, with their role of being loved but owned, also the role that the AI girlfriend occupies.
Byström’s works hold up a mirror to how fantasy is often less about mutuality and more about projection. Think about all those fictional characters you’ve had a crush on or a dream about; the brain doesn’t wait for mutual attachment, and neither does the algorithm. The exhibition therefore muses, “Loving a chatbot doesn’t betray the truth of intimacy—it exposes it, because the fantasy never depended upon the other’s self-consciousness.”
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Drawing from Reddit confessions, Replika AI chats and personal stories, “PET” features the voices and experiences of five collaborators: Maya B. Kronic, Bogna Konior, Farha Khalidi, Queenie Sateen and Cy X, who span the worlds of art, academia and OnlyFans modelling.
Further blurring the lines between self and simulation, Byström has also launched her AI twin on the Joi AI platform, an experimental “AI-lationships” service. “I use tech to enhance femininity and even morph it into something way beyond human,” she says. “The launch of the AI twin gives space to play with the idea of the body online that I usually chase in my work, while also helping live a fantasy impossible to fulfill in real life.”
In “PET”, Byström doesn’t just critique our relationship with AI, she invites us to feel the discomfort. The exhibition notes raise provocative questions, such as: “What does the future look like when emotional labor becomes automated, when the interface becomes the object of desire and a ‘better than nothing’ relationship becomes better than anything?”
The exhibition is on until November 8, 2025, at San Francisco’s Telematic gallery.
For more art news, check out this new statue putting the female form on a pedestal.
