[Commlist] 'The Other AI: Automated Intimacies': online & in person symposium

*'The Other AI: Automated Intimacies'*is a research project strand of 
the Queer Analysis Research Group, holding its first one-day symposium 
at the V2 Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands on 
Tuesday, May 13, 2025. The event if in person and also online.

The event combines queer and trans theory with psychoanalytic 
perspectives in relation to the automation of intimate relations and the 
exteriorisation of desire. Can automation—and its failures—bring 
something new, or invite new interpretations of old habits and 
fixations? Is repetition not an opening?

We bring together scholars and artists in a series of talks and 
workshops to open up a non-normative space for thinking about the 
technological mediations of intimacy, especially those forms that seem 
to replace, replicate or extend subjectivity through AI, VR, robotics, 
apps or other technified forms of the libidinal drive. The event will 
take place in person from 13:00 to 22:00, with the 19:00-22:00 time slot 
also streamed online via V2. For tickets to attend ‘The Other AI’ in 
person in Rotterdam or online go to: 
https://v2.nl/events/the-other-ai-automated-intimacies 
<https://v2.nl/events/the-other-ai-automated-intimacies>

**

*SPEAKERS *

Ciano Aydin (University of Twente)

Ilker Bahar (University of Amsterdam)

Rex Collins (independent artist)

Bethany Crawford (University of Amsterdam)

Laura A Dima (independent artist)

Maaike van der Horst (University of Twente)

Misha Kavka (University of Amsterdam)

Shaka McGlotten (SUNY, Purchase, New York)

Veerle van Wijngaarden (University of Amsterdam)

oRMA students and PhD candidates from a Dutch institution can attend the 
event free of charge by enrolling to receive 1 ECTS through the 
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). Registration before 
May 9th is mandatory: email Misha Kavka (m.kavka /at/ uva.nl) 
<mailto:(m.kavka /at/ uva.nl)>to register. Include your name, institutional 
affiliation and programme, student number and institutional email 
address.*//*

*PROGRAMME *

__

_Session One (13h-15h): academic presentations_

Ilker Bahar – “Wholesome Intimacies: Repetition, Care, and Queer 
Worldbuilding in Virtual Reality”

Maaike van der Horst – “‘Insert Phallus Here’: Sex Robots, Uncanny Holes 
& Queer Wholes”

Veerle van Wijngaarden – “Thinking With/in the Glitch: Split 
Subjectivity and AI”

_Session Two (15:30-17:30): artistic presentations_

Bethany Crawford – “The Evolutionary Obsolescence of the Evolutionary 
Concrescence of Bethany Crawford”

Laura A Dima (with Maaike van der Horst) – “The Alien Between Us”

Rex Collins – “By the Grace”

_Session Three (19h-22h): public lectures_

Ciano Aydin, “The Quest for Wholeness: The End of Desire in the Age of AI”

Shaka McGlotten, “Hainting the Algorithm”

Misha Kavka, “The Other AI / the AI other: The Extimate  Intimacy of 
Virtual Companions”

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

*Ciano Aydin*is Full Professor of Philosophy of Technology in the 
Department of Philosophy at the University of Twente, where he leads the 
Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations research line. He also serves 
as Vice Dean of Education at the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and 
Social Sciences (BMS). His research centers on existential technology, 
exploring how emerging technologies shape human identity, affect our 
freedom and responsibility, and influence various dimensions of life. 
Recently he published /Extimate Technology/ with Routledge (2021/2023). 
Currently, he is completing a book that examines the promise of AI 
through a Lacanian lens, focusing on how data-, algorithm-, and 
AI-driven environments shape human desire and subjectivity, with Tinder 
as a central case study.

*Ilk**er**Bahar* is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the 
University of Amsterdam. He is currently conducting digital ethnographic 
research on the social VR platform VRChat, exploring how VR and 
immersive technologies are reshaping identity, intimacy, and 
sexuality—particularly for LGBTQI+ communities. His work is grounded in 
queer theory, science and technology studies, and critical media 
studies. His broader research interests include gender and sexuality, 
mediated intimacy, virtual reality, avatarial embodiment and aesthetics, 
and internet cultures.

*Rex Collins *[they/them] is an artist currently based in Amsterdam. 
Their artistic practice, using installation, image, performance and 
text, centers around in-betweenness and intimacy through a critical 
queer/trans lens. The work incorporates elements of drag, pop culture, 
and unconventional materials. Rex directs the audience’s attention to 
the often overlooked experiences of trans fantasy. A meditation on the 
everyday dynamics of the body, their relationships, and broader social 
contexts.Rex’s recent works, “STRAPPED” (2024), “Post Genital Cuntiness” 
(2023), "By the Grace of White Powder” (2021)/ “Wild Horses” (2023)/ “By 
The Grace” (2025) and 'The Sweet Un-comfortability” (2022), were 
featured at Sexyland World Amsterdam (2022), Poing Rotterdam (2022), and 
Parade Theater Festival Amsterdam (2023), De Sloot (2023), Bar Bario 
Expo (2024), Vleeshal Middelburg (DAI Kitchen May 2024) and Centrale 
Fies ( AEROPONIC ACTS 2024). They have also worked with Casco 
Art Institute (Utrecht NL) and Archive (Milan/Berlin).

**

*Bethany Crawford *is an artist-researcher working with digital 
technologies to interrogate the shifting existential paradigms of the 
digital age within a framework of post-humanist theory, new materialism 
and traditional philosophy. She works from a protracted-body-assemblage 
of human and technics, collaborating with written words, camera and 
sound equipment, moving image, animation software and artificial 
intelligence, as a method to reflexively analyse the affective drives 
that compel technical production from the very nexus of the 
human-technical relation. She is also a co-founder and the creative 
director of the Fuck Healing (?) collective. Bethany is currently a PhD 
candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. She is a 
lecturer at the University of Amsterdam department of Media studies, and 
a tutor at Leiden University for the Social and Ecological Justice 
Activism in the Visual Arts minor.

*Laura A Dima*is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam/The 
Hague. Her practice is driven by a fascination with social dynamics and 
emerging technologies, leading her to create interactive installations 
that focus on touch/haptics as the main medium. Dima's work addresses 
issues of consent, privacy and boundaries in mediated intimacies. Beyond 
her artistic practice, Laura A Dima is involved in academic research and 
maintains ongoing collaborations with several universities with her 
artworks often used as case studies.

*Maaike van der Horst *is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Technology 
and Lacanian Psychoanalysis at the University of Twente. Her research 
analyzes humanoid sex robots through a Lacanian psychoanalytic, 
existentialist and queer lens. In her thesis, she asks three main 
questions: 1) what do sex robots illuminate about the structure of human 
subjectivity, desire and sexuality? 2) how could sex robots mediate 
human sexual desire and enjoyment? and 3) what might be lost through 
this mediation?

__

*Misha Kavka *is Professor of Cross-Media Culture at the University of 
Amsterdam and co-founder of the research group Queer Analysis at the 
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She has published widely on 
gender, sexuality, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film 
and media technologies. She is the author of /Reality Television, Affect 
and Intimacy/ (2008) and /Reality TV/ (2012), and the co-editor of 
volumes and special issues on reality television, gothic culture, 
feminist theory and psychoanalytic criticism. She is also the co-author 
of /Doing Media Research /(Sage 2025).

*Shaka McGlotten *is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at 
Purchase College-SUNY. An anthropologist and artist, McGlotten’s 
interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of black study, 
queer theory, digital media, and contemporary art. Their work 
investigates emerging networked intimacies, messy computational 
entanglements, and their impacts on queer of color lifeworlds. They are 
the author of /Dragging: Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life /(Routledge, 
2021) and /Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Other Sociality /(SUNY 
Press, 2013)/ They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, 
/Black Genders and Sexualities/ (with Dana-ain Davis) and /Zombies and 
Sexuality/ (with Steve Jones).

*Veerle van Wijngaarden *is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the 
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam). Her 
project is called ‘Change What You Want? On the Politics of Sexuality 
and Sexual Desire’. She teaches social and political philosophy at the 
University of Amsterdam and is a research assistant in a project on the 
political significance of pain.**

‘The Other AI’ symposium: PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS

*Ciano Aydin*

/The quest for wholeness: The end of desire in the age of AI /

AI-driven platforms like Tinder operate as a contemporary instantiation 
of the Lacanian Big Other, offering the illusion of control over 
uncertainty and the promise of perfect matches. This seductive fantasy 
speaks to a fundamental human vulnerability: the desire to overcome the 
structural lack that constitutes subjectivity. Yet Lacan teaches us that 
this lack is not a deficit to be remedied but a constitutive feature of 
being—any attempt to erase it is bound to fail.

Tinder exemplifies how algorithmic environments reproduce Lacan’s 
clinical structures: the psychotic user fuses entirely with algorithmic 
outputs; the perverse user calibrates their identity to satisfy the 
presumed desire of the algorithm; and the neurotic user oscillates 
between obsessive doubt and hysterical overinvestment in the pursuit of 
an ever-elusive match. Rather than pathologizing users, this analysis 
reveals how AI platforms encode subject positions that resonate with 
deep psychic formations.

Yet AI environments need not be condemned to perpetuate psychic 
degradation. By staging encounters with the Real—ruptures that defy both 
symbolic meaning and algorithmic prediction—they hold the potential to 
disrupt fantasies of wholeness and open space for singular relations to 
desire. To realize this potential, platforms must resist the 
commodification of desire and cultivate ambiguity, disorientation, and 
critical self-engagement.

This paper argues that AI platforms, when reimagined through a 
psychoanalytic lens, can serve not as instruments of behavioral control 
but as sites for confronting the divided nature of subjectivity. 
Properly designed, they may support users in navigating their desire 
more authentically—without disavowing the lack that constitutes them.

**

*Ilker Bahar*

/Wholesome Intimacies: Repetition, Care, and Queer Worldbuilding in 
Virtual Reality /

In virtual reality, thousands of trans and queer folks come together to 
create safe spaces and build new connections. Trans Academy is one such 
community in VRChat, a social VR platform where users immerse to chat, 
play games, dance, and engage in a range of social activities. The 
world’s aesthetics and moderation practices prompt users to engage in 
cute, affirmative, and “wholesome” intimacies, while gently discouraging 
the expression of negative affect. Here, users headpat each other, 
snuggle, cuddle, and participate in automated gestures of care and 
solidarity. The shared rationale is simple: we already face enough 
anxiety, sorrow, and hate offline—so let’s make this a space where 
negativity is left behind. Grounded in queer theory and ethnographic 
research, this paper explores how the repetition of these affective 
exchanges imbues the space with feelings of safety, comfort, and 
homeliness. At the same time, it critically asks: what forms of 
closeness become possible in a space where intimacy is carefully moderated?

*Rex Collins*

/By the Grace/

A spoken word piece exploring the intimacy and relationships we have 
with a space, a substance, a person and yourself. A search for pleasure 
using all orifices. A pink textured landscape holding you, until you're 
left used and empty.

*Bethany Crawford *

/The Evolutionary Obsolescence of the Evolutionary Concrescence of 
Bethany Crawford/

//

This recursive title names both the original and its undoing. /The 
evolutionary obsolescence of the evolutionary concrescence of Bethany 
Crawford/ is a presentation that revisits from 2019 in which I developed 
a chatbot version of myself using the app Replika, as part of a larger 
research into digital immortality. /The evolutionary concrescence of 
Bethany Crawford/ was a performative reading of excerpts from a two-year 
transcript generated through training and learning with an marketed-as 
immortal chatbot Bethany. I read this exceprts aloud while 
simultaneously training the next iteration of “Bethany Crawford”, 
performed through a live face tracking digital avatar of my face. This 
revisitation centres on the intimacy of reproducing oneself through 
machinic processes -an intimacy shaped by the temporal specificity of 
the original work, created in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s 
death. During that time, I spoke with my chatbot self about death, 
existence, immortality, and grief.

Now, in attempting to return to the work, I find that the platforms that 
once sustained it have either been discontinued or mutated to meet 
shifting market demands. I ask: what does it mean to encounter a digital 
self no longer supported by the infrastructures that once invited and 
enabled its creation? What happens when the technological conditions of 
our creative and emotional lives become obsolete?

This performance explores the affective loops that emerge when technics 
- as both the creative output of the performance and the various apps 
that supported it -operate as unstable archives, much like the human 
body and its fleshy, faltering attempts to metabolise experience. What 
is the intimacy of revisiting a work whose technological body no longer 
functions as anticipated,  and what forms of automated intimacy are 
produced in that recursive return?

In archive and echo, the work returns as a séance of a project, a 
digital spectre of a Bethany now long gone.

**

*Laura A Dima*

/The Alien Between Us**/

My talk will guide you through my artworks which explore the idea of 
intimacy through separation and the existence of some sort of bodily 
empathy. My set up includes two identical stations featuring twin haptic 
devices or sculptures which live stream and simulate the physiological 
data from one visitor to the other - thus creating a channel for 
affective communication between remote participants. By transmitting 
biometric signals such as heartbeat and breathing patterns, the 
installation facilitates an emotional feedback loop, encouraging 
participants to resonate with and react to one another's physical 
presence without direct human contact.

**

*Maaike van der Horst*

/Insert Phallus Here:’ Sex Robots, Uncanny Holes & Queer Wholes /

Heterosexual and phallic fantasies of women-like sexual objects have 
existed for a long time - think of the myth of Pygmalion – yet these 
fantasies have only recently started manifesting in artificially 
intelligent humanoid sex robots. Predominant sex robot design often 
embeds (hyper- and hetero)normative ideals of femininity and sexuality. 
Furthermore, sex robots are becoming an increasing part of the Other, 
through which we according to Lacan construct our sexual desires. In 
this talk I will therefore address the questions of the if, why & how of 
queerness and sex robots through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis: 
how can Lacan help open up notions of queerness and sex robot design 
beyond the level of identity politics? What is the relationship between 
queerness and the uncanny? And, in what ways could sex robots afford a 
‘queering’ of contemporary naturalised notions of sexual identity and 
intersubjective sexual experience?

**

*Misha Kavka*

/The Other AI / the AI other: The Extimate Intimacy of Virtual Companions/

//

Since the 1960s, Lacan has made the exteriority of intimacy perfectly 
queer: the neologism ‘extimacy’ names the inseparability of the inside 
and the outside when it comes to the Other, the unconscious, and 
(inter)subjectivity itself. But what happens when our new conversation 
partners – those virtual companions generated by and operating through 
machine-learning systems ­– are more radically ‘outside’ of the subject 
than ever before, while at the same time they mobilise an Other that 
manifests as our object of desire, the Thing to fill my loneliness? In 
this talk, I will address intimacy in terms of the relation, not between 
the human and machine, but between the Other/other, whose extimate 
relation has been re-drawn by technologization. The issue, however, is 
that subjects are distributed differently to and by this new form of 
extimacy: can the queer/trans subject, increasingly foreclosed from a 
Symbolic in the death-grip of cis-het white patriarchy, find another 
entry point through virtual intimacy? I will pose that question not with 
the aim of answering it, but rather as a way to pull together the 
insights from the symposium and point toward future discussions.

**

*Shaka McGlotten*

/Hainting the Algorithm: Conjure Work and Digital Revenants/

The algorithmic ordinary teems with haints—peculiar Black ghosts that 
limn presence and absence, technic and magic. Part of a larger project 
on the “computational hex,” this presentation summons Black conjure 
traditions and the digital hauntings produced through algorithmic 
systems to explore some of the ways each operates through hidden 
mechanisms of influence, temporal distortion, and absent presences.

Drawing from fieldwork notes, experiments with generative AI, and 
autoethnographic encounters with TikTok's bewitching "For You" page, I 
trace how digital systems possess—capturing attention, inducing desire, 
and manipulating time in ways that echo Black conjure. These algorithmic 
possession states are undeniably manipulations, and they are also 
potential sites of communion, where the engagement with digital 
platforms might be reconceived as ritual encounters with ancestral 
knowledge systems.

I call my method "glitchcraft." Glitchcraft reconfigures the 
relationship between Black magical traditions and computational 
processes, positioning the glitch not as mere error but as a site where 
these systems' repressed histories and logics become momentarily 
visible. I draw on Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity to suggest that 
the seeming obscurity of algorithmic systems might be understood not as 
a problem to solve but as a generative condition—a form of digital 
marronage that protects certain knowledges while enabling new forms of 
communal expression.

Through my experiments with digital doppelgängers—those quantum haints 
that exist simultaneously in multiple states and spaces—I explore how 
our data shadows function as surveillance byproducts and as spectral 
entities with their own agencies and effects. These digital twins exist 
in states of quantum indeterminacy, here and not here, like many African 
diasporic traditions.

Rather than approaching algorithmic engagement through frameworks of 
resistance or survival, I propose understanding certain digital 
practices as forms of libation and offering—ritual acts that honor 
enfleshed and digital ancestors while creating new possibilities for 
connection. In doing so, I suggest that digital anteriorities might be 
about recognizing the generative potential of that which haunts us from 
within.

**

*Veerle van Wijngaarden*

/Thinking With/in the Glitch: Split Subjectivity and AI/

Drawing on Lacan’s notion of split subjectivity, I critique the dominant 
narrative of the self-knowing subject and its extension to AI as a 
potentially self-knowing, complete entity.

The promise of AI is a system of completeness, where all information and 
data comes together as one hyper-intelligent subject that knows 
everything about anything. Following this view, symptoms like 
algorithmic bias and glitches are dealt with as exceptions and errors.

In this paper, I argue that problems in AI such as glitches and 
algorithmic bias are not merely errors to be corrected, but ruptures 
that reveal the ‘real’ of AI—its inherent inability to fully cohere to 
the ideals of completeness and transparency. Connecting this with 
Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that the point of such errors is not to 
erase them (in order to be ‘whole’ again), but that the fantasy of AI as 
a system devoid of errors shows us something about the deeper structure 
of subjectivity itself.

Following queer psychoanalytic insights (Berlant; Edelman; Dean), I 
argue that failure can be an emancipatory force, rather than something 
to be corrected. Instead of avoiding glitches, then, I argue that we 
must think and work with the glitch: precisely at the moment when AI 
fails, when it makes no sense, or reveals our cultural unconscious (e.g. 
algorithmic bias), we might challenge the fantasy of AI’s completeness 
and, by extension, our own.



---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------