Virgin Birth

Virgin Birth was included in Arvida Byström’s much talked about, first major solo exhibition, Cut the cake at Dunker cultural center, Helsingborg, Sweden (4 April – 4 August, 2024), where she explored the place naked bodies have on the internet, whilst also challenging the limits of how digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) can be used. In connection with the exhibition Dunker cultural center stated how:

Cut the cake shows newly produced works by the artist. The expression of the exhibition is maximalist and hyperfeminine, with large formats, bows and pink underwear. Arvida Byström is a multidisciplinary artist known for her use of hyperfeminine aesthetics. In her works, she explores the social and commercial impact of the internet in relation to themes such as femininity, identity, body image, sex and technology. Through mainly photography, video, installation and sculpture, she deconstructs the language of the internet and explores complex subjects. Already at a young age, she became a role model on social media and has since developed into someone who promotes the self-expression of young generations.

On her official Instagram account, arvidabystrom, the artist posted the following background to the piece (26 June 2024):

Virgin Birth plays with the idea of the Christian myth where God creates human in the image of him and we create machine learning and robots in the image of us. Of course, there is also no need for intercourse to give birth to these sorts of digital creatures. So, I let a 3D print of my AI s3x doll Harmony give birth to a phone with an AI version of me. It’s a bit inspired in a silly way by Zizek’s text “No Sex Please We’re Post Human” too. Also a critic was upset that the phone out from the vagina looks like an assault and when people say things like this as a critique I sort of just feel like: that is an accurate description of what technology feels like today so…

Swedish art critic and writer Lo Hallén also considered Virgin Birth worth a comprehensive comment and description in her review of Cut the Cake (‘Arvida Byströms konst är en karikatyr av AI som högre makt’, article in Sydsvenskan, 20 May 2024):

Over the past year, while Byström has been working on her new project, there has been a lively and sometimes panicked debate about AI. Taylor Swift has involuntarily posed in pornographic deepfake images, men who have been instrumental in the development of AI suddenly issue warnings concerning the potential dangers of the technology and educational institutions all over the world shake in their foundations. The image we are fed is one-sided, alarming and, above all, colored by a distance to the AI, as if it were a higher power rather than something we have developed ourselves. In the sculpture “Virgin birth”, Byström plays with the idea of development as a virgin birth. She has 3D scanned and post-processed the genital area of an AI sex doll, and lets it give birth to a phone. Step closer and you are greeted by an eerie AI version of Byström herself on the screen, happy to answer questions and talk about the exhibition. […] Not unlike how a sex doll, who has neither nerves nor brains, would experience a birth, Virgin Mary is often described as being exempt from pain when giving birth to Jesus. God has spared her from the consequences of Eve’s sins, one of them being going through labour and childbirth under exertion and pain. The sculpture is a caricature of the idea of AI as a higher power and reflects the technologies lack of human complexity, pain and sin in the guise of the Virgin Mary. This, in the middle of an exhibition born out of the meeting between man and machine. The choice to depict a birth, using a sex doll’s vagina, is thus conceptual, humorous, and certainly a little unpleasant, but discomfort is not always a bad thing.

Provenance
Gallery Steinsland Berliner, Stockholm.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions
Dunker cultural center, Helsingborg, Sweden, Cut the cake, 4 April – 4 August 2024.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation