Economies of Love. Part 7: Synthetic Love

Join us on Thursday, December 4 at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room for the seventh and final installment of Economies of Love, presenting Jen Liu’s I Am Cloud (2024, 15 minutes) together with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll (2009, 112 minutes).

The final screening of the series turns to figures who haunt the fantasy of automation: service bodies, invisible workers, and the soft infrastructures that sustain them. Across both works, gendered and racialized bodies, whether synthetic or human, underpin contemporary convenience, from training AI systems within transnational circuits of value to performing affective and sexual labor, while rarely being recognized as subjects in their own right. In this sense, the films approach synthetic love as attachment formed with bodies imagined foremost in terms of labor and use, where fantasies of companionship or connection rest on the presumption of absent interiority.

Films

Jen Liu, I Am Cloud (2024, 15 minutes)
I Am Cloud explores burgeoning forms of labor in the virtual era, and the workers hidden within confined, mechanical façades. The film is structured by three figures: the Amazon MTurk worker, the Xenobot, and the 19th century Chinese migrant sex worker in the US. Each is seemingly non-existent but also absolutely necessary, figures borne from the desire to separate work from human consciousness, and to compress the body into ever-smaller spaces.

Hirokazu Kore-eda, Air Doll (2009, 112 minutes)The film centers on a life-size inflatable doll who serves as the sole companion of a middle-aged man in Tokyo, until she unexpectedly comes to life and begins to explore the city with the curiosity of someone newly born. She finds work at a video rental shop and gradually forms a connection with a clerk named Junichi, but the limits of her fragile existence are exposed when an accidental cut causes her body to deflate. Adapted from a popular Japanese manga by Yoshiie Goda, this tragicomic drama uses its romantic-fantasy premise to explore urban loneliness, the gendered projections placed upon the doll, and the precariousness of being alive.

Economies of Love is a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. More information and an archive of previous screenings can be found here.

For more information, contact program[​at​]e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program[​at​]e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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