Machine Loves Not | "Machine Love"
- 野水
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
As a deliberate response to recent technological developments, the Mori Art Museum presents the group exhibition Machine Love: Video Game, AI, and Contemporary Art, running from February 13 to June 8, 2025. Featuring eleven solo artists and one duo—many of whom are internationally recognized rising stars—the exhibition highlights the centrality of AI generation, 3D modeling, motion capture, and big data integration in contemporary creative practices. From the glossary at the entrance to the technological frameworks embedded in the artworks, the show signals a sustained interest in how individual artists and their teams engage with emerging technologies.
There appears to be a prevailing optimism that technology could enable art to break new ground, challenge established conventions, and even forge new paradigms. As demonstrated by prominent museums and recent biennales, we may be on the verge of achieving this goal, at least in terms of material innovation. Some go further still, crying out love in the center of technology. Then, to what extent can technology, or those who wield it, respond to such longing?
The exhibition opens with Beeple’s Human One (2021–), greeting viewers with a distilled motif of the show: a post-human figure walking upright, bipedally, in a virtual realm. Possibly drawing from the RPG tradition, about one-third of the artists animate digital characters who traverse their respective worlds: Lu Yang’s Doku glides over cityscapes on a flying device; Kim Ayoung’s Ernst Mo and En Storm—both anagrams of "monster"—navigate virtual Seoul's bridges, tunnels, and warehouses on delivery quests; and Jacolby Satterwhite’s African-American avatars run endlessly through indeterminate, unlocatable landscapes, with no trace of a past and no clear future in sight.
These works share a palpable solitude that pulses through the LEDs and PCB boards. Audiences have their eyes drawn to the motion on screen, yet would find it impossible to attain any corporeal experience of the movements, aside from occasional motion sickness, for better or for worse. Nor can they get a heartfelt grasp of the surrounding environments; cityscapes blur into abstracted backdrops. Whether digital or flesh-and-blood, one is ultimately suspended—alone—in the chaos of sound and light effects. The difference is: digital bodies never tire, while embodied viewers feel sensory fatigue.
In a brief exchange between Hsu Chia-wei and Lu Yang, Hsu identifies a queer quality in Lu’s work—a reading Lu rejects, favoring instead a transcendence into a religiously infused cyber-realm, free from what Lu perceives as the obsession of identity. But the questions remain: Can one truly pray for the human species in virtual space while abandoning the material body and its entangled identity? And can such a prayer truly reach—or save—any of us on this side of the screen? After all, as Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists remind us, embodiment grounds all experience and shapes our being-in-the-world. Queer disability studies, too, has long cautioned against the fantasy of escaping the body through digital realms. Such dreams often fail to acknowledge how deeply embodiment structures subjectivity, and they risk forsaking those for whom bodily identity is not optional but the very site of social struggle. Some of us simply cannot "opt out" of systemic oppression tied to our identities whenever we can. Even in virtual domains, bodies marked by marginalization are often more surveilled, regulated, and commodified than others. Mantras may guide us in perfecting the self. But if that perfection comes at the cost of isolation, what does an audience gain from art that clings to solitary freedom?
Rather than fleeing the body or renouncing identity as mere obsession, a more nuanced form of freedom might lie in critically engaging with embodiment and social identity—both online and off. This means acknowledging their constraints and potential while seeking new ways to relate and reconnect. In this light, it is the less obviously “queer” works—such as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Calculating Empires: A Geneology of Technology and Power Since 1500 (2023)—that resonate with a deeper sense of love. Not love as a concept, but love as an ethic of understanding, connection, and care. Their work traces the entanglement of technological developments with imperial histories and earthly ecologies, insisting on a view of technology situated within human and planetary realities.
Ironically, despite the title Machine Love, love feels largely absent from this exhibition's dazzling landscape, other than Calculating Empires. Queering—understood not as identity-fixation but as a radical commitment to multiplicity, coexistence, and solidarity—has proved to be a viable means to generate love, especially for those dwelling in marginalized realities. Yet its recurrence in Satterwhite's attempts to disrupt new technologies and in the cross-world encounter between Kim's two identical monsters doesn’t guarantee any emotional resonance where love truly resides.
Our search for love and other human impulses continues, as it always has, since the dawn of speculative fiction. Just a few years ago, the anthology Love, Death + Robots (or ❤️❌🤖) echoed this craving and foreran this exhibition at least in terms of naming. Perhaps the urgency of that need stems from the fact that, in an accelerationist society, we are losing touch with the most primal, ineffable feelings and emotions. If this exhibition is another attempt to grasp the concept of love, then it fails to deliver the affect. In doing so, its queerness becomes hollow—ineffective, and estranged from the very tenderness it invokes.
Without queerness, love is dictatorial. Without love, queering becomes ornamental.