Marios Stamatis: Neither Nor
What happens to a shy person, a horny person, a lonely person, when they fall in love with AI? Once brimming with desire, now devoid of emotion—except the lust to be wanted—trying to find tecno-empirical proof that dreams do in fact come true. In “Neither Nor,” passion and desire, connection and isolation, past and future balance between abstraction and figuration, realism and speculation, within an oneiric scenery.
Drawing investigation from the fields of anatomy, algorithmic cognition, and techno-romance, this project focuses on a new body of work that examines human relationships through technology and its potential to enable people to transcend the confines of their physical bodies and immerse themselves in fictional realms where virtual reality and lived experiences converge. This new work consists of an installation—sculptures, objects, sound—and a script for a performance. It addresses the concept of midness in the contemporary environment we inhabit, as mentioned by author Shumon Basar.
The physical exhaustion referred to in media fatigue and the awkwardness in the way our bodies are balancing talk about how we navigate in our contemporary regime, governed by uncertainty for the future symbiotic relationships between humankind and AI. The inevitability in the loss of human decency, as our collateral damage of inexplicably falling in love with AI, in exchange to the gift of technological progress, and the “derealization” we experience are very much present in the work.
There is a poetic tension within the interdependency between two bodies, which can be paralleled to that of parasite and host; the friction generated within this very relationship is what the project attempts to examine. Spinoza and ideas around negating Cartesian dualism, Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton’s theories about the non-divide between nature and humankind, and future discourses about the hypothetical singularity complete the set of references that explore the tension in the relationship between humans and AI.
