Valentina Peri

My project for Villa Albertine, Proxy Failure: Mapping the Automation of Emotions, is a research-driven curatorial project investigating the rise of affective AI and emotionally responsive systems. Building on my long-term research into love, desire, and digital culture through exhibitions such as Data Dating, The Museum of Dating, and Artificial Intimacies, it focuses on companion chatbots and other AI systems designed to simulate care, empathy, and emotional presence.

The project starts from an urgent question: what happens when intimacy becomes automated? As AI companions enter everyday life, they begin to shape emotional norms, yet they operate through scripted interaction, data extraction, and commercial models based on maximized engagement.

During the residency, I intend to study affective AI as an emerging emotional infrastructure. My research will combine interviews, studio and lab visits, archival research, and artistic case studies. In Boston, I plan to engage with researchers working across AI, psychology, affective computing, human-computer interaction, and ethics, particularly within the MIT ecosystem. The MIT Media Lab, my partner institution, and especially the Advancing Humans with AI group, will provide a key context for this research through its work on AI and human flourishing. I also hope to meet artists and cultural institutions developing critical approaches to AI, intimacy, and technological imaginaries.

Starting from the premise that current design choices, business models, and infrastructures of major tech companies are not the only possible framework for relational AI, the project moves beyond polarized utopian and dystopian narratives. Can affective AI be designed to prioritize well-being and social benefit over profit? Can artists help reveal, resist, or rewrite the emotional scripts produced by technology companies?

The residency will allow me to develop a body of research, identify artistic practices and interlocutors, and formulate a curatorial framework for a future exhibition. It will culminate in a public lecture sharing the first outcomes of the project.

I wish to conduct this research in the United States because many technologies, business models, and cultural imaginaries shaping affective AI are being developed there. Companion chatbots, emotionally responsive interfaces, and AI systems designed to simulate care emerge from specific social, economic, and ideological contexts. For a project examining the automation of emotions, it is essential to work close to the environments where these systems are imagined, designed, tested, and commercialized.

Boston is particularly relevant for this research. The city brings together leading communities in artificial intelligence, psychology, design, human–computer interaction, and ethics.

During the residency, I plan to anchor my research through encounters with three groups at the MIT Media Lab: Advancing Humans with AI, which explores AI for human flourishing; Cyborg Psychology, which examines the psychological and relational entanglements of human–AI cohabitation; and Affective Computing, a foundational research area which explores how emotions are represented and expressed through computational systems.

MIT and Boston also has a unique historical and symbolic importance: in 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA there, one of the first chatbots to simulate therapeutic conversation. Sixty years later, returning to this origin point allows me to question its legacy as automated companionship enters everyday emotional life.

I also hope to meet artists, designers, filmmakers, and curators developing critical approaches to AI, intimacy, and technological culture. Beyond MIT, I would like to visit the MIT Museum, ICA Boston, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Carpenter Center. A visit to New York would allow me to connect with NEW INC and Rhizome.