The Other AI: Automating Intimacy with/through/beyond Artificial Intelligence Day 1

Flipping the focus from effective AI to affective AI, from intelligence to intimacy, this event gathers scholars and artists of the psycho-digital realm to ask how bots, avatars and replicas are getting under our skin.

As chatbots become our newest social obsession, it is more important than ever to explore the practices, pleasures and pitfalls of falling in (love) with AI through the lens of the other AI: automated intimacies. Most discussions have tended to approach artificial intelligence from a cognitive perspective, as a tool to help with mental or menial tasks, even as users evolve from seeking information to seeking companionship. In The Other AI, we will concentrate on the ‘other’ side of so-called intelligent machines: the intimate, sensual, emotional appeal that these machines make to us as creatures of feeling.

Spread over two days at the V2 Lab for the Unstable Media and Het Nieuwe Instituut, the event will be divided along the lines of sex and love. On Day One @ V2_Lab artists and academics will analyse ‘Desiring Machines: Sex and Robots’ to ask how sexual technologies are changing, or revealing, erotic practices. On Day Two @ het Nieuwe Instituut, performances, lectures and workshops will focus on ‘Virtual Love and Companionship – for Real’, asking after the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technologized love: how real does it feel?

Preliminary programme Day 1 Desiring Machines: Sex and Robots

Block 2 | 15:30-17:30 Academic perspectives

15:30 Misha Kavka: What do we desire when we desire machines? 15:30 Misha: Introduction

16:00 Ilker Bahar: Glitching Penises: ERP (erotic role play) in Social VR

16:30 Maaike van der Horst: On sex robots

17:00 Q&A

17:30 BREAK

Block 3 | 19:00-21:00 Artistic perspectives

19:00 Nor / House of Lost Bois (performance)

19:30 Alicia Framis: (artist’s talk)

20:00 Laura A. Dima (artist’s talk)

20:30 Panel discussion with academics & artists

21:00 Drinks and informal discussion

Day 2 takes places at het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

Register to attend: [email protected]

The event is organised by the Queer Analysis research group, NICA, in partnership with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and het Nieuwe Instituut.

See also: www.nica-institute.com/event-the-other-ai-automating-intimacy-with-through-beyond-artificial-intelligence/

Tickets:

https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/the-other-ai-tickets-1988017626236?aff=oddtdtcreator