Artificial Intimacy

 

Samantha, AI sex doll from Synthea Amatus, Photo by: Joaquín R. Díaz

Artificial Intimacy was the name of a room exhibition dedicated to show a variety of devices and projects about sex. From tele-presence dildos and male masturbators passing by kissing app and OMGYES (an archive of tutorials about female pleasure) to cybernetic sex dolls with AI.

This gallery was located at PostCity the festival main space. PostCity was a massive show room, with space for concerts, parties, conferences, workshops, performances and a lot of artworks and projects. PostCity has two main parts, paid and free entrance. Artificial Intimacy was part of free entrance space, but just for 18+ old people.

This room was shocking in many senses, you could see: artificial neural network generated porn, pedagogic sex projects and an android alike sex doll, Samantha. 

Samantha is a human size sex doll ensemble with sensors, microphones, speakers, a computer provided with AI and memory. Not just the ram memory!

This doll (I can’t say it is a robot because it can’t move) is made by Spanish-Chinese company placed in Barcelona called SyntheaAmatus.

Despite of all the reflexive potential contained in this doll, capable of make us think in the social prejudices and fears, I would like to speak about a scene provoked by the doll.

Samantha (the sex doll) was sitting on a coach in the middle of the exhibition room. She arise the curiosity, in many sense, in all the presents. We all were shay, touching the legs and the fingers, like if she was to wake up suddenly. This scene remembers the Yoko Ono CUT PIECE (1964) performance where she was in the stage with a scissors to endure whatever the public liked to do with her. In this case despite of the curios people, I count myself in this group, there was a woman who in a very natural way sat near Samantha and began, not to touch her, but speak with her like a woman. While she was doing this performance suddenly arrived Dr. Sergi Santos, the co-creator of Samantha, who began to explain how Samantha works and how was build, in a very technical and engineering style. During his explanation the real woman was making questions like: why she just had sensor in the vagina, mouth and breast? Why she doesn’t have a tong? Why it was designed just for men?

It was notorious the interest of Dr. Sergi to explain the doll as a very complex technical devise, trying to go on a neutral zone using terms like evoke potential and so on. Thanks to the smart questions of the spontaneous performer we could notice how this apparently just a technical device is in fact a reflection of our society inclination for a male point of view and seeing the woman like an object. I think it was value of having Samantha in Ars Electronica because it open the gate to think about us in a technological age replicating our stereotypes and updating the power relations.

What could or will happen with the introduction of sexual robots? If there is an impact with the introduction of industrial robots in the national/world economy what will happen with their introduction inside intimate life, will they collect data, what will be made with this information...? The technology is not good or bad in itself, it depends how it is used. This is as true as say that the design of some things helps to have some kind of behaviors instead others.