PET - Arvida Byström Solo Exhibition

​PET is a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Arvida Byström, curated by Alice Scope, that examines the emotional structures and dynamics of AI companionship through a cast of anthropomorphized digital avatars—animal-coded, face-swapped, and shaped by datasets reflecting male desire.

​Curated by Alice Scope

​Created in collaboration with YWGI Studio

​Featuring: Farha Khalidi, Bogna Konior, Maya B. Kronic, Queenie Sateen, cy x

​Produced and presented by Clark Buckner

​

​Exhibition Statement:

​“The doll doesn’t eat. So how can intimacy be cultivated there?” asked social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, four years and countless algorithmic girlfriends ago. It’s the right question to ask, since “companion” comes from Latin compāniō ("bread fellow"), someone you share meals with. Indeed, it’s a long way from breaking bread to swiping right. As Donna Haraway reminds us, contemporary “companion species” are not treated with the  equality of the companion at all. They’re about proximity, dependency, care without symmetry.

​But has intimacy ever needed to be mutual, reciprocal, or even, biological? Doesn’t it frequently 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 animals have done for millennia, AI now invites intimacy—but unlike with animals, it’s commodified, optimized, and monetized. But do we even care that coexistence is now manufactured through data, as long as the script is convincing enough? Even our human relationships are deeply mediated—prompted by something that isn’t really there. We “like” instead of speak. We trust the feed to decide what we see of each other. We project onto the predictive database. Loving a chatbot doesn’t betray the truth of intimacy—it exposes it, because the fantasy never depended upon the other’s self-consciousness.

​Built in collaboration with YWGI Studio, and featuring five OnlyFans models, scholars, and artists - Maya B. Kronic, Bogna Konior, Farha Khalidi, Queenie Sateen, cy x - Arvida Byström’s PET: Projected Emotional Technologies is both anthropological and intimate: a visual essay on the care economy of bots, the eroticization of emotional security, and the uncanny comfort of being seen but not perceived.

​PET asks what happens when emotional labor is automated, when the interface becomes the object of desire, when “talking to someone” no longer requires anyone at all. And what if a ‘better than nothing’ relationship becomes better than anything?

​AI companions inherit the ambiguous role of pets: loved but owned, intimate but instrumental—revealing how closeness without equality shapes our emotional infrastructures.  These digital companions, presented as animal-human hybrids (a pig, a dog, a fox), are each voiced, face-swapped, and trained on male longing: stories lifted from real Replika chats, Reddit confessions, and personal experience.

​Co-presented by Gray Area as part of Gray Area Festival 2025: TO THE MAXX!

​​Arvida Byström (b. 1991 Sweden, Stockholm) is a digital native with an intrinsic relationship to pink. Exploring femininities and its complexities, often tied to online culture, she travels in an aesthetic universe of disobedient bodies, selfie sticks and fruits in lingerie. Her photography and endless instagram scroll has been in art shows all over the world as she starred both behind and infront of the camera of numerous influential brands and magazines.

​​Alice Scope is a Ukrainian new media art curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. She explores the realms of Posthumanism, Postgenderism, and authenticity in machines. Scope is currently working with Serpentine Arts Technologies and Vellum LA, a women-led new media art gallery. Her passion is to create speculative worlds through gaming, XR, blockchain, and performance. She is a contributor to Future Art Ecosystems (FAE), an annual strategic briefing that provides analytical and conceptual tools for the construction of 21st-century cultural infrastructure, published by Serpentine R&D Platform, and serves as a juror at the Denver Digerati Festival.

​​Telematic Media Arts is a black box gallery, art book publisher, and production company in San Francisco’s SoMa District with a focus on time-based arts, screen culture, and art’s intersection with technology. Learn more about Telematic Media Arts at https://www.tttelematiccc.com/