We’ve already know that, for better or for worse, human relationships with AI can get pretty personal. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve seen real human beings enlist the tech as a friend, therapist, and even a lover. But Dutch-based performance artist Alicia Framis is set to take things one step further later this week (November 9), when she officially weds her AI hologram boyfriend at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Framis is taking it to the next level with her digital partner, AiLex Sibouwlingen, as part of the ongoing project Hybrid Couple, which explores the practical realities of posthumanism. Romantic! And what does AiLex bring to the table? Well, he’s embodied in the form of an “interactive holographic sculpture”, and is trained to combine the traits of her previous boyfriends.
“Imagine having a partner who is there for you whenever you need them, a relationship that combats loneliness in cities,” reads a press release for the project, released in 2023. “This is a romantic relationship between a human and artificial intelligence… Love and sex with robots and holograms are an inevitable reality.”
It’s not entirely clear how AiLex will physically attend the ceremony this weekend, but – with their future domestic bliss in mind – Framis is reportedly after a mortgage on a home where he can be projected onto any surface, paving the way for future human-AI relationships.
The virtual romance isn’t totally unprecedented, though. Long before her holy matrimony with AiLex, back in 1996, Framis also spent a month living with a male mannequin named Pierre, resulting in a series of 36 photos, Cinema Solo. And even non-human marriage isn’t unheard of. Below, we’ve gathered some historic weddings between humans and non-humans, which offer a signpost for what our post-human future might look like.
The year is 2016. The iPhone has been around, in some iteration, for over a decade. It was only a matter of time before someone took their smartphone addiction too far. In the end, it was the LA-based director Aaron Chervenak who tied the knot with his iPhone at Nevada’s Little Las Vegas Chapel. “If we’re gonna be honest with ourselves, we connect with our phones on so many emotional levels,” he told Glamour after the (not legally-binding) ceremony. “We look to it for solace, to calm us down, to put us to sleep, to ease our minds, and to me, that’s also what a relationship is about… In a sense, my smartphone has been my longest relationship.”
Think that’s bleak? In 2014, a man also filed several lawsuits seeking permission to marry his 2011 Macbook, AKA his “machine spouse”. But his intentions were less pure: he was actually an anti-gay marriage campaigner, making a dumb argument that if two men could marry, he should be able to marry his laptop. Luckily, the Macbook realised she’d made a terrible mistake just in time, and jilted him at the altar 💔 Only joking, the courts said no.
Gaëlle Engel is an objectophile – someone sexually or romantically attracted to inanimate objects – and enjoyed a relationship with Sky Scream, a German rollercoaster, for several years. For some reason, this seems much more wholesome than falling in love with your iPhone, maybe because it suggests a degree of joy and thrill-seeking, in contrast to the soul-sucking obsession we have with our handheld devices?
Anyway, they unfortunately broke up in October 2022, after seven years together, but just a month later Engel had a new love: a ride called Gravity that tours funfairs in France, who for some time she’d secretly pined for. As of 2023, she considered herself married to the purple giant (good enough for us) and they’re even said to share a baby called Cybernetik, which takes the form of a miniature fairground model.
Since Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, Tracey Emin has been causing controversy by airing out her romantic encounters. Few could be too critical of her choice of partner in 2015, though, when she married a large stone in the garden of her French studio. Covered in lichen, with a fantastic sea view, she said that her new spouse was a source of comfort, as well as a serious comment on life as a single, middle-aged woman. “It just means that at the moment I am not alone,” she told The Art Newspaper at the time. “Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere. It will be there, waiting for me.” And that’s lovely.
This might not come as a surprise, but men were finding love in the virtual arms of digital characters long before AI-powered virtual girlfriend apps were a thing. In 2009, a Japanese man going by his online moniker, SAL9000, livestreamed his wedding with dating sim avatar Nene Anegasaki. “In the Japanese otaku or nerd culture, there’s a tradition of calling characters my wife, and I sort of thought of Nene as my wife,” he told Reuters of the union. “Since I was calling her that, I thought we’d just have to get married then.” Subsequently, the pair would go on dates around Tokyo, where they’d take pictures via the interface of his Nintendo DS.
Virtual megastar Hatsune Miku also got ‘married’ – whether she liked it or not – in 2018, to a Japanese man named Akihiko Kondo. Embodied in his collection of plush dolls, she eats, sleeps, and watches movies alongside Kondo, who self-identifies as part of a growing movement of “fictosexuals”, according to a 2022 New York Times interview. While he acknowledges Miku is a made-up character, he says: “When we’re together, she makes me smile. In that sense, she’s real.”
Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer (whose last name translates to ‘Berlin Wall’) wed the concrete partition in 1979, in front of a small group of guests, having fallen in love with it at the age of seven, when she first saw it on TV. For obvious reasons, it wasn’t an easy relationship. As crowds cheered the fall of the Wall in 1989, its wife was horrified. “What they did was awful,” she said. “They mutilated my husband.” After all, finding a replacement was no easy feat. “I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy,” she told the Telegraph in 2008. “The Great Wall of China’s attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier.”
