The Swedish artist explores AI companionship, the eroticization of emotional labor, and the blurred intimacy between human and machine through animal-coded avatars and digital voices that question what it means to love in the age of artificial affection. A surreal study of desire, projection, and control in the digital era. On view at Telematic Gallery in San Francisco.
What happens when intimacy is automated and desire becomes a matter of code? In ‘PET: Projected Emotional Technologies’, Arvida Byström dissects our growing dependence on machine empathy and how technology reprograms affection itself. Co-produced with YWGI Studio and curated by Alice Scope in partnership with Gray Area, the show presents animal–human hybrids—pig, dog, fox—embodying the algorithmic construction of femininity and the commodification of care. On view at Telematic Gallery in San Francisco until November 8th, 2025.
“The doll doesn’t eat. So how can intimacy be cultivated there?” asks anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, a question that anchors the exhibition text. “But has intimacy ever needed to be mutual, reciprocal, or even biological? Doesn’t it often emerge from projection alone? Don’t people routinely feel love for fictional characters, unborn children, ‘Brangelina,’ porn stars — pets? The brain doesn’t wait for mutuality to fire the circuits of attachment—and neither does the algorithm.”
Like pets, AI companions are loved but owned—intimate yet asymmetrical. Through collaborations with Maya B. Kronic, Bogna Konior, Farha Khalidi, Queenie Sateen, and cy x, Byström assembles a fragmented portrait of desire sourced from Reddit confessions, Replika chats, and personal stories—voices face-swapped into animal-coded avatars trained on male longing.
“I use tech to enhance femininity and morph it into something beyond human,” says Byström, who also launched her AI twin on the Joi AI platform. ‘PET’ turns Telematic Gallery into an uncanny mirror—not reflecting our machines, but the fantasies that built them.
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