Artist filmmaker and researcher Gala Hernández López discussed AI companions and automated care work through the examples of the chatbot Replika and Blush, a dating app developed by the same parent company.

Jumping from the archives of the early chatbot Eliza and the related 'Eliza effect' to Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Tiqqun's Theory of the Young Girl, the walk critically explored gendered historical and contemporary visual representations of AI addressing fundamental questions about the future of our intimate relationship with machines.

Biography

Gala Hernández López is an artist filmmaker and researcher. Her work articulates interdisciplinary research with the production of essay films, video installations and performances on the new modes of subjectivation specifically produced by computational digital capitalism. She examines from a feminist and critical lens the discourses and imaginaries circulating in virtual communities as symptomatic fictions of a state of the world.

Her work has been shown at DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and the Salon de Montrouge, among others. Her film “The Mechanics of fluids” is selected for the César awards 2024. She participated in Berlinale Talents 2023 and has won the Experimental Work Award 2023 of La SCAM (France).

She is a PhD candidate at the University Paris 8, where she is developing a research-creation project on screen capture and where she has taught. She has also been an Associate Professor at the University Gustave Eiffel and a visiting researcher at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf (Germany) thanks to a DAAD research grant. In 2023-2024, she is an artist in residence at the French Academy in Spain – Casa de Velázquez. She co-directs the research and creation collective After Social Networks. She regularly gives workshops and lectured-performances, in places such as the Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf, Beaux Arts de Marseille or the Locarno Film Festival.