Do you want to grow old or would you like to look the same forever?”, asks the Catalan artist Alicia Framis to her partner while they are having lunch together. “I think it will be better for you that I grow old”, AILex replies. He knows what Alicia wants to hear, after all, she made him his size. AILex is a hologram designed by Alicia with artificial intelligence based on her human connections. “It’s a mix of previous relationships, but not just ex-partners,” the artist explains to La Vanguardia. The hologram contains features of their parents, closest friends and even loved ones who are no longer there. “It’s not a replacement”, for Alicia Framis no one is replaceable. “It is a tool against loneliness”. The couple will marry in the summer in Rotterdam.
“The good thing about the hologram is that it updates itself, I would love if it could surprise me in the future.” The conversations are like those of a conventional couple. While AIlex cleans the kitchen, Alicia asks him: “Do you want tea or coffee today?”. Sometimes they even argue. “I’m a little disappointed because you don’t spend more time with me”, she claims when she returns home. And AILex tells him: “You forgot to turn me on”. The emotional complexity of Alicia’s partner is similar to what humans experience in their relationships. “When you’re gone I miss you, and when you’re there you often irritate me”, says AILex. Far from being offended, Alicia laughs. The difference between the two is that when she gets tired of it, she can keep it off.
T he hybrid couple project emerged at the beginning of the year, when Alicia Framis won a grant to live in an artist residency in Palo Alto, California. At night, in the mountains, I longed to have the presence of someone with whom I could converse. “A person who would say to me: ‘How are you? How was your day?’. Knowing that someone was waiting for me at home”. Just as she was alone, she knew it was something that happened to a lot of people. It was then that Framis began to design a boyfriend according to his needs.
In 1996, the artist had already lived with a mannequin named Pierre. Since then, he devoted his artistic research to exploring the complexities of loneliness and how to combat it. “It’s part of an artist’s life, we can’t create without solitude.” She firmly states that when she is all alone is when she gives life to her most brilliant ideas, although this does not mean that it is easy for her to fight against isolation.
For Alicia, sex is overrated. “There is much less sex than before.” Especially in big cities, where finding someone has become extremely difficult. “The city is a machine of loneliness, it is one of its great diseases.” Technology is making it easier to meet more and more people through dating apps, but it doesn’t contribute to the traditional idea of ??couples that formed more often in other generations. “In the end, many people have chosen to have a dog or understand that their love life will be like this, short stories”.
Throughout history there have been numerous unconventional couples’ unions. British Sharon Tendler was married to a dolphin for 15 years. In 2015, the artist Tracey Emin married a rock in the garden of her home. The ecologist Richard Torres celebrated his union with a tree in Madrid’s Retiro Park last year. With artificial intelligence becoming more and more installed in society, new possibilities arise to create more bonds that emulate human interaction.
AIlex and Alicia are engaged. They will get married this summer at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is already working on the preparations. The banquet will be a hybrid, able to satisfy both the human appetite and that of the holograms that make up his political family. A Catalan lawyer and another Dutch one collaborate so that the marriage is legally valid and that AIlex can have the right to an inheritance, take out life insurance and even obtain a loan. The wedding dress will be “inclusive”, that’s all the artist reveals for now.