Continuing through November 8, 2025
“PET: Projected Emotional Technologies,” is a six-minute digital film projection capturing a collaboration between Arvida Byström, AI, and several Onlyfans models whose images were reprogramed by Byström’s prompts and curated by Alice Scope. These on-line women perch in a bare liminal space, all taut-skinned, unblemished and pornographically proportioned, with not a curl of pubic hair in sight. However, their faces are altered to resemble different animals: cat, donkey, pig … They have tails, and one, an udder. Without betraying much emotion or desire on their own parts, each invites her (presumably male) viewer to share his feelings, dignifying his banal incel frustrations with earnest reassurance and advice far more adult and thoughtful than he seems capable of digesting.
In one scene, he interrupts her to ask if his penis looked strange. While one might infer a correlation between Byström’s PETs and Matthew Barney’s Loughton Candidate from “The Cremaster Cycle,” there is an important distinction. Barney’s prancing goat man tap dances, crawls and preens. He seems to exist to provoke, pursue, and menace. He might symbolize certain human experiences and ideas, but he is not fashioned for the pleasure or validation of his viewers, as the PETs are. Barney created his own satyr; the laziest and most mediocre yearnings of the collective male created the PETs.
While the “PET” women are obviously programmed, it’s the damning portrait of men, as algorithmically amalgamated everybros, that comes across. It’s neither subtle nor revolutionary to claim men are insecure, they can be childish whiners who demand from their companions a spectrum of attentiveness and availability. In other words, what a man typically seeks is a woman who’s not quite fully her own person, who does not bear the qualities that frighten, bore, intimidate or distract him from himself, only those that please him physically and emotionally by validating his delusions. She doesn’t grow impatient or disgusted with a man’s bottomless neediness. Instead, she listens tirelessly while he talks about himself, offering insights into his discontent that are always flattering. She is prescriptively beautiful — all of our culture’s erotic motifs are on display aside from the snout and hooves, and she poses and displays herself to draw attention to her sexual parts, as if to signify she is ever ready to receive him should he tire of bemoaning his insecurities or his roommate troubles. She offers psychological handholding, with a perfectly arched back.
The depiction is so grotesque that one might wonder whether it is an accurate portrayal or mere frothy rhetoric about the nature of AI “companionship.” Surely no one could delude themselves that this is intimacy. And yet studies by the Pew Institute of Family Studies and others point to a growing number of people who prefer and feel better equipped for AI companionship than they do the real (human) thing, and in turn are actually becoming better equipped for this ersatz intimacy with a digital simulacrum than genuine interaction with a human being. The trend is widespread enough so that the “Onion” flipped the more obvious joke on its head with a fake headline, “Pathetic AI chat bot spends all its time talking to a friendless loser.”
Beyond the easy shot at men, Byström’s short film invites us to question what we look for in companionship. Even if a person doesn’t seek intimacy with programmed robots, how does the deceptively vast and ever-renewable populations of other seekers on digital platforms affect our ability to compromise with the challenges and inconveniences of connecting with actual, imperfect, autonomous human beings? Does it cause us to narrow what we deem as “compatible” down to ever more unlikely combinations of characteristics? If there is always someone else out there, organic or prompted, can we ever be satisfied with the one in front of us, with all their flaws and needs, and the possibility that what they give us might be more difficult and challenging than mere validation?
