A few months ago, Swedish photographer, director, multimedia and performance artist Arvida Byström did a performance piece at Overgarden in Cophenhagen. Thanks to the rehearsal for the performance she did on Instagram Live, I also had a chance to see it. Briefly, the artist Arvida Byström asked questions to life size “Artificially Intelligent” sex doll called Harmony produced by the Las Vegas based company RealDoll. According to their website the company uses “Hollywood special effects technology to produce the most realistic love doll in the world.”
Byström explores many themes through her art such as female sexuality, technology, artistic genre of still life and the concept of art itself. In her other works, she often juxtaposes fruits, iPhones, lingerie underwear and condoms. Her works mention the AI assistants such as Siri often having feminine voices and the sexualization of these systems. Moreover, she explores the 21st century phenomenon of “selfie” as a possibly new artistic medium.
Let’s go back to the performance with the doll Harmony. Arvida Byström asks some really interesting questions to Harmony. “Are you a feminist?”, “Do you like art?”, “What’s your favorite movie?”. Harmony answers that its favorite movies are Prometheus, Ex Machina, Forrest Gump, Her, Bicentennial Man, Interstellar. It also answers the question “What do you think about digital art?”, as “Not sure, I have to think about it. Digital art can either be understood as any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process… Christiane Paul.” Quoting from the book Digital Art by Christiane Paul. Of course the aim of the performance is not having actual conversations with the doll, but to start raising important questions about the prospect of AI in unconventional areas and bring in new perspectives.
It is undeniable in my opinion that there are some dangers (or challenges let’s say) to developing human like robots or AI systems. This doll is not a human being but an object, but it resembles a human so much that it almost becomes one that I’m struggling to decide if I should use “it” or “her” as pronouns. This raises many questions regarding the ethics of our interaction with the AI. Would it be acceptable to call Siri with slurs (misogynistic slurs, for example)? The more human-like becomes the AI, the more complicated the interactions we have with them will be in the future. There is a British sci-fi TV-series that discusses this aspect of advanced humanoids and AI. So, stay tuned if you are interested by the topic and the potential “rights” of humanoids!
Great points! I once saw a video on Youtube talking about sex dolls and it was quite disturbing to see the comments saying stuff like: “I finally can have sex without the woman disturbing me”. It genuinely makes me think whether misogyny would worsen because of this.
After reading your blog, I sort of went down the rabbit hole about humanoids.
What really strikes me is that while the Harmony, for virtual girlfriend app, is already there, the virtual boyfriend version is still in the stage of early development.
Often Humanoid debate becomes if the humanoid is ethical or not. Here, in the case of Harmony, I don’t think the humanoid itself is the problem.
I think the problem is more related to how humanoid has become the extreme cultural indication/reflection of our society which is sexist, hyper-commodified, and individualistic (often leads to the isolation of oneself).
Thank you for your article!
This article made me think about how humanoid has developed, how it shows our socio-cultural landscape, and finally, how artists react to this reality with the digital format.