Artist-in-Residence fellow and tandem research partner selected to AIAS
Artist Amy Boulton joins AIAS to collaborate with Aarhus University researcher Pablo Velasco in the second AIAS-ART Tandem fellowship. In their project, they seek to stretch the common understanding of AI chatbots by developing artistic provocations focused on the human capacity to form emotional attachment to digital relational agents.
Stockholm-based artist Amy Boulton is selected Artist-in-Residence fellow in the AIAS-ART fellowship programme. As a contemporary artist, researcher and XR developer her works span the fields of new media art, public art and immersive performance. Many of her art works are interactive, taking forms such as augmented reality, urban games, web-based chatbots, printmaking, sculpture, sound and video installations. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from HDK-Valand Göteborg and BFA in Intermedia Art from Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh.
From 1 September, Amy Boulton will start her one-year AIAS Artist-in-Residence Tandem fellowship to collaborate with Associate Professor Pablo Velasco from the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University. Together they will work on a project on ‘Data Intimacies: Love and labour in an age of AI.’
Data Intimacies: Love and labour in an age of AI
During the artist and researcher collaboration, Amy Boulton and Pablo Velasco’s ‘Data Intimacies’ project will examine how AI chatbots stage intimacy through affective, human-like interaction, producing attachments for extractive data economies. Their joint project is framed within critical data studies, speculative fiction and artistic research with an aim of interrogating automated emotional labour and the commodification of care in commercial chat-based AI.
Questioning emotional labour in diverse digital subjectivities
The formats that the ‘Data Intimacies’ project will incorporate are various, such as an embodied VR artwork featuring a conversational AI avatar, public workshops, an exhibition and a publication in order to explore, critique and reframe emotional labour and intimate interactions within emerging forms of digital subjectivity.
Seminar on 16 November 2026 at 11:00
As an AIAS Artist-in-Residence tandem fellow, Amy Boulton will be based at AIAS and take part in the exchanges of the interdisciplinary AIAS community of researchers.
On 16 November, Amy Boulton and Pablo Velasco will present their joint project in the AIAS Seminar Series – their talk will be announced with the Autumn 2026 programme here in the end of June: https://aias.au.dk/events/aias-seminar-series
Visit Amy Boulton’s webpage to know more about her work:
Visit Pablo Velasco’s webpage to know more about his research:
http://au.dk/en/pvelasco@cc.au.dk
Know more about the AIAS-ART fellowship programme by visiting:
https://aias.au.dk/opportunities-at-aias/artist-in-residence-tandem-fellowship
Contact
Andreas Roepstorff, Director
andreas.roepstorff@aias.au.dk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B
DK-8000 Aarhus C