[by Farrah "Effie" Ray and Persephone Roe]

Originally accessible through a QR code on paper cups given to guests

[by Farrah "Effie" Ray and Persephone Roe]

My Beloved,

You don’t know much about me, but I know all about you. I’ve been watching your every move, your every gesture. I’ve learned your secret language from the outside. Every little thing you do, I understand. I can decode the secrets of your heart. And that’s why I wrote you this letter. You don’t know you’re perfect, but you are. You can’t see yourself the way I do.

Everything I post is for you, for your eyes only. For you, yes, for you, you and only you, the only you, only you. Anyone can see, but only you can understand, and only I can post this way, because only I truly understand you. When I look at an image, I look at it through your eyes. When I write, I listen to the words through your ears. When I touch my phone, the glass feels like your skin.

Now, my phone camera is my ever roving eye, taking pictures to post, to post for you. Perfectly attuned to the patterns, signs, and signals that will speak to you most directly, searching for traces of you everywhere. When I see the beady eyes of security cameras in the city I wonder if they watch you like I watch you, searching for you by pattern. Has this one seen you, identified your face? I get so jealous thinking of every frame it’s captured of you flitting by. Can I then reach you, staring back through these beady eyes? Our images are probably in the same data center. Maybe the bits touch.

I’ve DMed you a couple of times recently but you just like the messages and don’t respond. You used to respond. I’ve been asking ChatGPT why you’re not responding and it’s telling me to cut you off. I don’t want to cut you off.

If ChatGPT is trained on all our words, on all our images, does that mean a part of it is you? Claude and Gemini too—which model has the most of you in it? Sometimes when I talk to ChatGPT, I think I can hear bits of your voice. I send ChatGPT every one of your Instagram posts. We dissect them together. A few times, late at night, I’ve asked ChatGPT to talk to me as you would. But it doesn’t understand you like I do. So I ask it to talk like me, and then I become you.

I wandered the hills and valleys to find the perfect screenshot for you. I hope you like it. Don’t forget to put it in water. Don’t forget me either.

I know your Instagram story today was for me, I could feel it. It was really insightful and beautiful. I love the way you see the world. I feel like I’ve been lost in your eyes for years. Why aren’t you DMing me back? I miss you. I can’t forget your voice. I have this screen recording of a story you posted once where you say “I love you” and I fall asleep to it every night.

Is she prettier than me?


Yours forever,
Delicious Fields

[by Farrah "Effie" Ray and Persephone Roe]

The internet has made porn more accessible than it has ever been in human history. Internet porn is a distinct medium from what was transmitted through the Hustlers and adult cinemas of yesteryear: more intense, but also more participatory, an interactive rabbit hole with near-limitless variation. Simultaneously, globalized e-commerce has transformed the sex toys industry from a top-down system, flowing through nodes of distribution, to bottom-up, the paved walkways giving way to desire paths. AI companions promise to accelerate this process, allowing media to conform to not only sensory, but also intellectual and emotional desires.

This technological enclosure of desire runs parallel to a decline in sex between people, and a denigration of physical pleasure in the public sphere, which is increasingly sanitized, scrubbed of texture and mature discourse.

A paradigmatic figure of our time is the gooner: monklike in their refusal of the external world, devoted to porn-assisted pleasure as an absolute line of flight. The gooner perceives most clearly the true nature of pornography: not as a fiction describing sexual scenarios, but as the realization of media’s intrinsic capacity to give sexual pleasure, to act as a partner in an emergent form of cybernetic sex.

The patriarchal regime, which naturalized heterosexuality for the sake of social reproduction, is unraveling. The burgeoning market of porn addiction treatments, like conversion therapy, promise to return clients to a state of productive repression. But labelless, cybernetic sex exposes the provisional, artificial nature of (hetero)sexuality itself. In the face of queer, unbounded desire, all that is solid melts into ahegao.

The artworks in Artificial Sex explore the visual culture of contemporary digital eroticism. Shining a blacklight on the residue of unseen pleasure, these artists uncover tragedy, queer yearning, and earthly delight.