AI Companionship: New Relations, Emotional Infrastructures
6–8 July 2026 · AMP Gallery, Peckham · Part of London Data Week
At AMP Gallery, nine works explored how technologies mediate care, intimacy and everyday life. Rather than asking whether AI can feel, the exhibition considered how platforms, algorithms and interfaces shape relationships and emotional support. Visitors encountered these questions through VR, robotic movement, film, games and an emotionally responsive domestic scene.
Nine works, shared questions
Noosphere II: Collective Veil
Lili Shen · 2025 · Interactive VR installation
Live ECG and skin-response signals were translated into sound and a shared VR environment. Participants entered a world shaped by several bodies at once, asking what happens to private feeling when it becomes shared data.
相 / Phase
Seph Li · 2022 · Interactive audiovisual installation
Visitors used a bespoke controller to influence an evolving audiovisual system. Simple rules generated complex patterns, linking computation with Daoist ideas of change and inviting reflection on the systems that quietly shape perception.
Earth Manor
Canhe Yang · 2026 · Interactive web-based game
Players guided a sentence through a web-based game of refusals, detours and blocked routes. The work made platform governance tangible, asking how much agency language retains when expression must pass through safety and compliance systems.
Codename: O
Zishi Tu (Yuxi Chen) · 2026 · Robotic installation
Choreographed mechanical fragments repeatedly assembled and separated, briefly producing recognisable forms. The installation presented reality as something continually made and disrupted, asking viewers to consider how machines, perception and computation produce a sense of stability.
The Pink Stuff
Teng Wang · 2026 · Video installation
An AI-generated arm endlessly wiped glass on screen, while a stained pane hung in chains in front of it. This collision of digital repetition and physical matter brought hidden labour, maintenance and care into view.
Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot
Lawrence Lek · 2024 · Single-channel CGI video
A CGI film followed a Carebot created to support other artificial intelligences in crisis. Drawing on the Buddhist figure of compassion, the work shifted attention from what machines can do for us to who cares for them.
© Lawrence Lek. Courtesy of the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Co-commissioned and co-produced by Frieze and Forma for the Frieze London Artist Award 2024.
Happy Home
Cat Menzies · 2026 · Interactive installation
Speaking into a telephone changed a domestic scene through speech analysis, sentiment and toxicity detection. Found objects from the artist’s childhood home challenged the seamless smart-home ideal, foregrounding anxiety, sensitivity and neurodivergence.
Chameleon
Yanhua Chen · 2026 · Stop-motion animation
This stop-motion animation imagined a city where access to work, housing and services depended on readable, predictable behaviour. Daily routines became acts of camouflage, revealing the pressure to conform within systems organised around efficiency.
Book of Infinity: 1001 Nights
Ada Eden · 2024 · AI-powered role-playing game
In this game inspired by Persian folklore, stories generated weapons and reshaped the world around Shahrzad. Players collaborated with generative AI to challenge the king, exploring how language can alter agency, authority and imagined futures.
Artwork images and stills from the original exhibition materials.
Exhibition team
Produced by EAST2046
Curator — Zijia Feng (Jiayu)
Co-Curator — Ziyi Xiong
Curatorial Assistant — Jie Huang
Consultants — Lois Liao; Raine (Yuqian) Li
Technical Consultant — Snow (Xueyi) Huang
Spatial Curator — Hannah Liu
Graphic Design — Li He
Special thanks: Homeward Express 远方速递; Vieunite.
Academic support: Goldsmiths Computational Arts and RCA superFUTURES.