Vytas Jankauskas is a media artist, designer, and educator specializing in connected objects and artificial intelligence. His practice critically examines how technology shapes mundane spaces and rituals.
Vytas' work has been showcased at notable venues including the Medialab Matadero, V&A Digital Design Weekend, Tate Modern Late Exchange, CCCB (with Superflux), Chroniques Biennale, Chronus Art Center, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, ISEA, and Cité du Design St.Etienne, among others.
Currently, he is the Head of Digital Pool at HEAD–Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design) and leads interdisciplinary programmes at the Innovation Lab of La Plateforme in Marseille.
From 2019 to 2021, Vytas was the Head of Research and Creation at the Chronus Art Center Lab in Shanghai. In 2021, he also served as an Adjunct Faculty member at NYU ITP, Tisch School of the Arts. Prior to these roles, he worked as a designer at the critically acclaimed speculative futures design practice Superflux in London, from 2015 to 2018.
What is a “latent intimacy”? Where do we catch glimpses of intimacy in today’s human-machine interactions? And what else could intimacy be? For us, latent intimacies gesture to AI's potential for alternative forms of intimacy. They echo the semantic accidents captured in earlier, more primitive human-machine interactions, the surprising, unintended meanings and non-sequiturs that hint at new possibilities for connection between humans and machines.
In Latent Intimacies, we used interviews, observation, and prototyping to produce three Études Brut, “studies in rawness”, refracting what we thought we knew about intimacy through three specific speech synthesis and customised generative language models. The raw, industrial forms of these devices may obscure their purpose and functional application, but, at the same time, they are ‘not mere accidents, waypoints on the way to something else.’ (Bogost 2012: 93) They are here, they work, and therefore they are possible.
What else could AI be? We approached the language model as a minor technology, detached from scalar norms of efficiency and optimisation (Anderson and Cox 2023; Fartan 2023). Open-ended, emergent, and nondeterministic, speech synthesis and generative language models enable fluid, unpredictable interactions that can challenge our assumptions about what's possible. These raw studies are small-scale experiments, embodying alternative trajectories for human-machine relations that stand apart from dominant narratives of AI as a universally capable, general-purpose technology. Rather than promising seamless integration or humanlike intelligence, the prototypes embrace constraints, frictions and detours, spotlighting the contingencies of specific human-AI configurations.
Study 1: Demolition
Intimacy through vulnerability, the capacity to be damaged or harmed.
Our first study, Demolition, is site-specific, a block of concrete encapsulating half a dozen WhatsApp chats, our online interactions with those friends and family members who agreed to take part. You can ask the voice agent anything you want, and it will try to supply the best possible answer, sampling text from this tiny, intimate dataset.
It will then ask you to judge if its answer is relevant.
“I invite you to take a part of me.”
Using automation to erase memories of past experiences can liberate us from the fangs of yesterday. Revisiting prior interactions through Demolition's constrained interface conjures flashes of past generosity, intimacy, and care – digital residues by turns gratifying and disconcerting. Textual snippets of the past, stripped from their original context, can supply catharsis. At the same time, the interaction allows users to calibrate their engagement, asserting their agency in the difficult process of mourning and moving on.
Exit. Exist. Enter. Erase. Repeat.
Study 2: Red Book
Intimacy through protocol, a codified series of guidelines that facilitate orderly interaction, through a shared understanding of the rules of engagement.
Inspired by a mystical social game played by Mexican children, Red Book blends chance, prophecy, and divination. Playing the game requires a set of protocols for activation and engagement, while stressing the importance of disengagement. Leaving without permission may have undesirable consequences.
The future is uncertain. People experience uncertainty as a source of discomfort and unease. It can leave them feeling vulnerable and precarious, threatening what they know of their place in the world. Given this, who do people turn to for answers, advice, guidance?
Red Book is an curated language model, trained on the favourite books of a close-knit group. Breathing life into a corpus of texts, the language model uses its recombined sources to prompt dialogue, creating a surface for discussion and collective meaning-making.
A group looking for answers designates a spokesperson to address the Book, much as one would a voice-activated digital assistant. Once activated, the speaker delivers prompts and questions, channeling the group's curiosities and yearnings. Some questions linger unanswered. As the interaction draws to a close, the speaker must seek permission to leave.
"Your presence is no longer required."
Study 3: Cats
Intimacy through latency, the delay between a cause and its effect.
This study intertwines the daily lives of cats, their caretakers, and the community. A tiny AI narrator, Cats offers a unique perspective on the world. Translating snapshots from a cat-worn camera into basic spoken texts, the AI emulates a cat. It sticks around, but sets its own pace, providing pleasure, ungoverned, on its own terms.
Cats takes an hour to load, and roughly 40 minutes to compute a text describing a randomly taken image. The AI outputs around ten images a day; ten short texts spoken aloud, captioning everyday moments seen through a cat’s eyes. We seek connection, closeness, and this device forces us to wait, tracking the low-maintenance intimacies of pet ownership. Cats have latency. Durations of absence are experienced when you go about your ordinary everyday life outside the home, leaving your furry friend alone during business hours.
“I saw a man sleeping on a bench in a grassy park.”
Other technologies promise to monitor our pets, but plug-and-play surveillance casts them as captives, not peers. Giving your cat a voice introduces an alternative context. Cats casts the language model as a wearable minor technology. The prototype doesn't just entangle human, animal and machine, but purposefully obfuscates and reorders those categories. Its delayed transmissions demand patience. Rather than inundating users with a barrage of texts and images, Cats yawns and stretches, relaxing into the interval between outputs.
Acknowledgments
Latent Intimacies was produced as part of Medialab Matadero’s LAB#03 Synthetic Minds Collaborative Prototyping Lab, which ran from January 24–February 10 2024. Heartfelt thanks to Alan Warburton, Patrick Harrison, Irma Pužauskaitė, Laura Forlano, Tim Cowlishaw, Vasundhra Dahiya, Rohit Gupta, David Hayward, Valdis Silins, Charlie Loyd, Michelle Kasprzak, and Murphy (another cat).
References
Andersen, C. U., & Cox, G. (2023). Toward a Minor Tech. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 12(1), 5–9. https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v12i1.140431 Bogost, I. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press. Fartan, T. S. (2023). Rendering post-anthropocentric visions: Worlding as a practice of resistance. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 12(1), 43–60. https://doi.org/10.7146/aprja.v12i1.140437
