Affective Machine

Our relationship with AI is increasingly intimate, but it remains ambivalent. No longer perceived as a cold, distant technology, AI now elicits feelings of love, dependency, curiosity, fear, and distrust in everyday life. As chat tools learn to mimic human language and patterns of communication, they appear ever more affective, creating a dynamic that influences our emotions and behaviours.

In this exhibition, thirteen artists examine the changing contours of the way we relate to AI. Some interrogate how AI emulates human behaviour and how users project desire, feeling, and expectation onto it. AI is cast as a social and emotional presence, blurring the boundary between human and machine.

Other artists embrace AI as a medium through which intimacy, grief, affection, and hope are expressed. Personal memories and collective histories are imaginatively transformed.

All of these expressions are inseparable from the limitations of the technologies. AI structures the ways expressions are produced, aestheticised, and understood. Built on uneven datasets and embedded social assumptions, AI often reproduces social bias and historical exclusion as it shapes how people are represented, recognised, and valued.

To understand an affective relationship with AI is to confront its politics. Across the exhibition, affective machines channel broader questions of agency, intimacy, and subjectivity. The works on view invite us to question our relationship with technology, as well as the meaning of being human.