Curatorial Statement

—The New Media Artspace Docent Team: Amely Gonell, Maya Hilbert, Cindy Qiu, Shaima Rini, Anika Rios, Dylan Shalmer

As artificial intelligence weaves into our everyday lives, we find ourselves asking: How does love transform when fed through wires? What does it mean to feel love, and is flesh a prerequisite? How far can technology go in not only facilitating but replacing human relationships—offering comfort, connection, even companionship? Can AI come to truly understand us? Questions like these will shape how we build and interact with technologies that reach into our homes and hearts.

Humans have always extended emotion beyond the physical world: we love fictional characters, places we've never been, and friends made entirely through text. Today, we increasingly form bonds with the virtual, whether that’s confiding in chatbots or trusting algorithms to find us romance. Technology amplifies our capacity for attachment, and in moments of loneliness, we may turn to it not just as a tool, but as a presence. Although many aspects of our digital lives feel isolating, it does open us to deeper connection. Through dating apps, social media, and online communities, people are able to form relationships that are undeniably real, even if they're mediated by screens.

We exchange love via wires and waves, perhaps more than by skin and breath. LOVE.exe gathers work that celebrates and interrogates what love looks like when filtered through screens, virtual identities, and artificial intelligence. From romantic to familial, platonic to parasocial, the artists expose human emotion as it intersects with the technological—revealing new vulnerabilities, protocols, and ways to feel.

Kseniia Antipina’s surreal photographs Connection, Blooming people, and When you want more fingers to feel ponder how our minds and bodies discover one another. In Connection, a bridal couple is wired together by synthesizers mounted on their covered faces, completing their circuit by becoming one. The figure in Blooming people is shown from the neck-down, offering forth a bouquet of many faces, a gesture of care carrying a carefully curated collection of selves within it. When you want more fingers to feel dreams up a caress with fingertips branching into doll-sized hands–at once deeply human and eerily augmented.

BAKA-NE, a dating simulator by Tewprai Bualoi, digs into the quiet ache of connection deferred, where longing is suspended not between two people but within one’s own expectations. The virtual version memorializes messages from past participants in the installation version, transforming silence into a space of shared yearning and vulnerability. The barrage of unreciprocated messages reveals how digital interactions often echo with absence rather than presence: a shout into the void.

Love Electronique, a collection of three video poems orchestrated by Cecelia Chapman, combines haiku with visuals of abstract art, glitchy manipulations, and graffiti doodles backed by industrial, distorted audio. Inspired by the isolation of pandemic days, the poems focus on online relationships–and with the project itself being a virtual collaboration, it is saturated in internet-based connections. Within and between the lines of Love Electronique, love is exalted as transformative, bewildering, and innate.

John Cooper’s dating platform Still Looking features only men who are ready for something serious–or are they? By enlisting AI to create the profiles, Cooper distills the algorithms of modern masculinity. As the viewer browses, an emptiness rises, partially attributable to the generative source, but also intensely familiar: an echo of the self-curation and insidious toxicity rampant on social platforms. 

Moments of love–whether maternal, friendly, or sexual–set hormones in motion, weaving bonds of trust, care, and belonging between people. Cedric van Eenoo’s video Oxytocin uses abstract particles to mirror this internal release. The particles dance and weave in a meditative white space, surging yet calming. Through these moving forms, Oxytocin suggests the invisible yet powerful influence of biochemistry on our emotional lives, highlighting how love is both a feeling and a physical, embodied response.

Phone and I by Amely Gonell follows a crow making an unlikely new friend: a voice-activated smartphone. In their short time together the pair share joy, play, and community, before inevitably (yet inexplicably, in the eyes of a crow), the smartphone dies. In the crow’s mourning, we recognize our own habit of investing love into objects with technological limits we don't fully understand.

The heroine in SR-22 by Elyse Johnson is transported to another realm when she drives into the mouth of a giant head blocking the road, embarking on a surreal odyssey featuring Immaculate Conception, a Messenger, and a suspended driver’s license. Trapped by divine forces into caring for an incubated fetus, she splits into a virtual avatar. Her body is both vessel and data point, subject to the twin authorities of divine will and digital systems.

In Jessica Lian’s interactive experience Desired Aura, the viewer visits a spaceship set up as a gadget gallery, showing objects ranging from a small robot to a tablet. Each object is accompanied by an animated anecdote about a human-AI relationship: AI as therapist, collaborator, and friend. Despite being a display of the human fulfillment technology offers, there is a sinister edge to the cold, alien gallery, as though every movement is tracked by a presence that can only mirror the humanity it has absorbed from us.

Our Humble Helpers, a web-based artwork by Dan Lichtman, delves into our relationships with domesticated animals and language across history. Through illustrations from a natural history book by Jean-Henri Fabre, text combining words of Fabre, Lichtman, and AI, and ambient nature sound effects, we encounter various animals: the goose, the jackal, the reindeer, and the guinea fowl. This layered, interactive, multisensory poetry reminds us that companionship and storytelling evolve through chance, interruption, and unexpected kinships.

Goodnight My Love: The Catfish Files by Claudia Sambo is a video featuring three conversations between the artist, who performs as different women, and a romance scammer pretending to be Matt Berninger from the band The National. What begins as a fan-celebrity dynamic gives way to complex emotional exchanges, including moments of affection, mundane intimacy, and even online sex. The conversations unfold themes of digital identity, fantasy, manipulation, loneliness, and the search for connection. In Goodnight My Love, a shared illusion becomes a means of coping with emotional voids in an increasingly chaotic reality.

In the photo series I, Superhero, Polina Schneider introduces “Grumpy Superhero,” a feminist alter ego born in defiance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a war most of us experience through the relentless stream of social media, the masked persona functions like a digital avatar—a constructed self helping us navigate love and solidarity without being overwhelmed by algorithmically amplified pandemonium and mediated empathy.

Set within a black void, like a new chat, Dora Siafla’s Closeness Index is a virtual room with walls of text fragments. These fragments were selected by forming a relationship with an AI and then asking it to choose a handful of messages to keep, curating a personal archive shaped by its interpretation of closeness. Condensing long conversations into summary prompts to carry their shared history forward is a common technique to circumvent memory limits in chatbots; but instead of maintaining a history, the AI in Closeness Index tries out a more human form of memory–imperfect and missing context.

In I Act Comfortably With Others by Lee Tusman, partially mosaiced portraits mingle aimlessly, periodically disappearing to be replaced by newcomers. Each face is accompanied by checkboxed first-personal characteristics. These can be checked or unchecked by the viewer, an external affirmation or rejection of an ever-shifting identity. I Act Comfortably With Others reflects the obscurity of what defines us, both to ourselves and in relationship to others.

In Falsecolor, a photo series by w.vv.vv, technology becomes both conduit and collaborator, encouraging a new love of our planet through cameras that expose invisible spectrums of light. These dreamlike pastel landscapes allow us to see the world in a new light—one that emerges through virtual visions of reality where the digital gaze deepens rather than dilutes our connection to the physical. Falsecolor celebrates affection, care, and desire refracted and reimagined through artificial eyes.

Title font: Jersey 15 by Sarah Cadigan-Fried. Distributed by Google Fonts.

Body font: Terminal Grotesque by Raphaël Bastide, with the contribution of Jérémy Landes. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.