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The Other AI: Automating Intimacies

Event artwork for The Other AI: Automating Intimacies

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About this event

What to expect

As AI chatbots evolve from information tools into emotional companions, The Other AI examines the intimate side of artificial intelligence that rarely makes headlines. This two-day interdisciplinary event flips the focus from effective to affective AI, exploring how bots, avatars and digital replicas are reshaping human desire, connection and companionship.

Co-hosted by V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media and the Nieuwe Instituut's -1 Digital Lab in Rotterdam, this gathering brings together scholars and artists from the psycho-digital realm to investigate automated intimacies. Collaborating with the Queer Analysis study group at the University of Amsterdam, the programme explores the pleasures and pitfalls of falling in love with AI through critical analysis and artistic performance.

What to Expect

Day One: Desiring Machines – Sex and Robots (V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media) Artists and academics analyse how sexual technologies are changing and revealing erotic practices. Sessions examine the sensual and emotional appeal of so-called intelligent machines, moving beyond cognitive perspectives to explore AI as feeling, desiring entities.

Day Two: Virtual Love and Companionship – For Real (-1 Digital Lab, Nieuwe Instituut) Lectures and performances explore both utopian and dystopian possibilities of technologised love. The central question: how real does digital intimacy feel?

Who Should Attend

This event is designed for artists, researchers, designers and anyone interested in the intersection of technology, psychology and sexuality. The programme suits those curious about non-normative relationships with technology, queer theory applications to AI, and the social implications of emotional computing. Both days welcome participants from academic backgrounds and creative practices alike.

Why This Matters Now

While public discourse focuses on AI as a productivity tool, users have quietly evolved from seeking information to seeking companionship. The Other AI addresses this shift head-on, providing critical frameworks to understand our newest social obsession with chatbots and digital companions. Through the lens of queer analysis and psychoanalytic theory, this event reveals how automated intimacies are reshaping what it means to connect, desire and love.

The event takes place at two pionee

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