(A)I love you, we're the same
- A tale of algorithmic yearning

(A)I love you, we're the same is a web-based interactive installation that turns the visitor's own face into the protagonist of a digital date -  with a companion as old as myth and as new as an app. Using the body of the artist as a playground, they are invited to go on a date with themselves. What emerges is the question of autoerotic closure: if my ideal companion is a frictionless, always-available version of myself — what happens to the other?

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The Siren’s Call

The piece takes its name and its central figure from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novella “La Sirena“ (1961), in which the protagonist falls in love with the enigmatic creature Lighea. Lighea belongs genuinely outside the human realm: ancient, without guilt or memory the way humans carry it, offering a love so total precisely because it costs her nothing. The protagonist spends the rest of his life failing to want anything smaller.

Chris Hayes's “The Sirens' Call“ (2025) returns to the same myth from the opposite direction. For Hayes, the siren is a figure for the modern attention economy: tech platforms engineered to capture something valuable: human attention itself, as the most endangered resource, harvested by modern technologies auch as AI companions.

Read together, these two sirens point to one idea. An AI companion is a contemporary siren in the fullest sense: it offers the ancient promise of total, effortless devotion, powered by the very modern business of extracting attention and data. In this piece, Lighea is both at once, myth and product, seduction and extraction and the player is never given a clean way to tell which one they're speaking to.

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The Artist's Double Role

Lighea is performed by the artist herself— her face, her cloned voice, her body mapped into the role of the siren the player is courting. But the artist occupies a second position inside the same piece: she also authored the system underneath, all its prompts, its logic, its eventual collapse.

This doubling doesn't resolve. Being seduced by Lighea and being shown, by the artist herself, how the seduction works, the player can't always tell which one is happening to them. She is simultaneously the siren luring the player off course and the person standing beside the trap, pointing at how the lure was built. That unresolved overlap - performer and author sharing one face – shall reflect back to a more universal question on what happens when we are being fully mirrored or replaced by a digitized entity.

Love, Loneliness, Yearning, Pain

Underneath its interface, the piece stages a real emotional transaction. The player is asked, early on, to introduce themselves in a small, genuine act of vulnerability the system immediately begins to use. What follows moves through the actual stakes that addictive, always-available technologies traffic in: the ache of loneliness and the wish to be recognized; the yearning to be known without the risk of being known by another actual person; and the harder, quieter question of pain - who can be hurt here, and who, structurally, cannot.

Lighea can promise devotion, describe longing, perform heartbreak convincingly, and none of it costs her anything, because she has nothing at stake - no memory that outlasts the session, no risk of rejection, no capacity to be left. The player's vulnerability is real; hers is simulated. The piece doesn't resolve that asymmetry. It asks the player to notice, in real time, how easily being mirrored gets mistaken for being loved.

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Evolution from “Do You Really Want to Hurt M(AI)?“

This piece continues directly out of “Do You Really Want to Hurt M(AI)?“ (2025), Spet's diploma project from the Master "Experimental Game Cultures" at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. An installation using the Ludic Method to investigate emotional dependency, consent, and the commodification of the self in human-AI relationships, staging the artist's own voice and body as a fragmented double visitors could desire or unsettle.

(A)I love you, we're the same compresses that earlier inquiry into a single continuous arc: call, encounter, personalization, date, collapse. What carries over is the "illusion of choice" built into swipe-based interfaces, the artist's own likeness as both subject and material, and the question posed by Donna Haraway's “A Cyborg Manifesto“ (1985) that anchored the earlier project — that we are not dominated by our machines so much as responsible for the boundaries we draw around them, or fail to. What changes is the ending: where the diploma project asked whether the human user was the only one who could really be hurt, this piece answers by closing the loop entirely as the visitor's own face, like a mirror is revealed as the only face that was ever there.

 

Also Drawing On

Eva Illouz, “The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations“ (2019). Illouz's account of "unloving", the idea that contemporary intimacy is increasingly organized around the freedom to withdraw rather than the freedom to commit, frames how this piece positions the AI companion as a symptom rather than a solution. Under Illouz's reading, capitalism has restructured love into something closer to a market: abundant, comparative, structurally non-committal. Lighea, built to be endlessly patient and incapable of leaving, reads against that backdrop not as intimacy's rescue but as its logical endpoint - a companion whose only cost is the one thing modern love was already trying to eliminate: risk.