Digital Intimacies 11: The Love of Machines

Date: 03.12.2025 - 05.12.2025
Conference / symposium
Format: hybrid
Location: Camperdown, Australia
Event Fee: Free

Organizer(s):
University of Sydney

For Digital Intimacies 11, we invoke Alan Turing’s seminal question: “Can machines think?” — but with a crucial reimagining for our era: “Can machines love? Or, how can machines love?” Just as Turing proposed his famous imitation game to test machine intelligence, we now face intimate interactions where the boundaries between human and machines blur. When we can no longer distinguish between human and machine-generated affection, what becomes of intimacy itself? We invite submissions across disciplines to engage with, question, appreciate, and evaluate the manifold manifestations of machines in intimate spheres: machines that we love, machines that we use for love, machines that can or cannot love, machines that serve as signs of love, and more. We welcome papers exploring topics including, but not limited to: • Cultural politics of human-machine intimacy and synthetic intimacy • Resistance to and non-use of AI-mediated relationship technologies • Dark sides of algorithmic intimacy and automated desire • Media and cinematic representations of AI romance or “artificial lover” • Modern “imitation games” where machines pass as human in intimate contexts • Methodological considerations in researching human-machine intimacies • Evolution and critique of matching algorithms in digital courtship • AR/VR and intimacies • Broader practices and phenomena of digital intimacies

https://digitalintiamcies11.wordpress.com/

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein