XXX Machina
Keywords：immersive installation, AI, erotic desire, identity, intimacy, deepfake imagery, bodily distortion
Abstract
XXX Machina is an immersive computational installation examining how artificial intelligence destabilizes erotic desire, identity, and intimacy. Operating as an “autonomous desire machine,” it generates a recursive stream of deepfake imagery, videos, stills, and 3D renderings of the artist, via diffusion models trained on a custom dataset scraped from AI porn generation platforms. As it tracks and reprocesses recurring themes across prompts, XXX Machina injects traces of previous bodies into its own generative logic, forming unstable visual lineages. What initially resembles conventional pornography begins to fracture on closer inspection: bodies glitch, fragment, and recombine, detaching from coherent corporeal referents and becoming increasingly uncanny.
Philosophically, XXX Machina explores the tension between symbolic lack and algorithmic saturation. Lacan’s model of desire, grounded in absence, is destabilized by AI’s potential for frictionless gratification –pornography without search, without delay. Yet AI, lacking subjective interiority, offers not desire but its disarticulated residue: warped anatomies, symbolic breakdowns, fragments without bodies. Through this collapse, the work probes whether desire itself is being reshaped by machinic fantasy.
Through a Baudrillardian lens, the installation examines how synthetic imagery precedes and redefines erotic experience, recursively producing desire instead of just mirroring it. In this hyperreal terrain, the erotic is unmoored from flesh and reassembled as an endlessly customizable, algorithmically amplified spectacle. XXX Machina asks what becomes of longing in a system where the Other has already been simulated and made obsolete.
Jury Statements
The second Award of Distinction goes to XXX Machina by Erin Robinson and Anthony Frisby, a bold exploration of our erotic desires as they are increasingly shaped by AI technologies. Functioning as an ‘autonomous desiring machine’, the piece generates an endless stream of pornographic images, which in turn are fed back into the machine, creating a body of distorted and unreal properties. While current debates about AI porn and deep fakes usually revolve around faces, most of which are used illegally, Robinson draws our attention to the statistically calculated bodies themselves. By literally giving them a face—in this case the artist’s own—Robinson critically engages with a machine-driven fantasy that draws on vast databases of disenfranchised sexual imagery. Reminiscent of early body art, it is a practice that does not speak from the outside, but from the inside of our sexual drives and desires. The jury spent many hours discussing this work and we would like to acknowledge the impact it had on us.
Reference
Byung-Chul Han. The Agony of Eros. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Robinson, Erin, and Anthony Frisby. XXX Machina. Ars Electronica Festival 2025: Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition. “Immersive computational multimedia installation exploring how AI disrupts and reshapes erotic desire, identity, and intimacy.” Ars Electronica.
