XXX Machina

XXX Machina is an immersive computational installation examining how artificial intelligence destabilises 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 commercial pornographic diffusion models, drawing on an appropriated corpus of three million prompts scraped from an AI pornography platform. As it tracks and reprocesses recurring themes across the 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 account of desire, grounded in absence, persists within AI’s promise of frictionless gratification: pornography without search, without delay. Desire gathers around a body produced in parts; its fragments come to embody objet petit a, the object-cause around which desire turns but which no completed body can provide. Each image offers another arrangement of these desired parts while preserving the lack that calls forth the next. Through a Bataillean lens, recursion carries the body from fragmentation into erotic dissolution. The desired parts lose their anatomical place and disperse across flesh, while their pornographic charge persists beyond the organism that once contained them. Attraction and recoil remain held together as the bounded individual is drawn towards the continuity Bataille locates in the loss of separateness. In offering her face to bodies assembled from strangers’ fantasies, the artist treats recursive generation as sacrifice in Bataille’s sense: an expenditure of the coherence that made the body useful as a pornographic object. Even as it is spent, the body remains erotically available, binding its dissolution to the same libidinal economy it appears to exceed. XXX Machina received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica 2025 in the category Artificial Life & Intelligence.