John and Mary

Emotions and feelings of pain are considered essential for our moral behaviour and social interaction. But how does a machine express them and what do we as viewers understand about them and how? The 17-minute work ‘[John and Mary] - by artificial and non-artificial systems’ is an audiovisual experiment that blurs the boundaries between humans, machines, natural and artificial systems, emotions and their mechanical reproduction. To this end, media artist Lisa Reutelsterz generated 2023 poems on topics such as emotions and AI, machine ethics, pain perception and machines with the help of a language model and read them into image diffusion models to create synthetic videos. These clips were presented to authors without context in order to write their individual interpretation of the videos, which in turn can be heard in the voiceover. Within the dream-like sequences, a pull is created that seduces the viewer into giving meaning to the images and reveals a tension between machine and human semantics. Abstractions and ambiguities open up new spaces of meaning that blur the distinction between man and machine and seek a critical reflection on ethical standards in technological development.