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A bedridden person lies immobile on a stark white bed. As the camera pans to an almost-lifeless arm, a robot intones with as much care as a clipped, monorhythmic voice can muster: “I am sorry that your family and friends are not able to be here with you. I will do my best to comfort you.”

This is by artist Dan Chen, an interactive installation designed to give visitors a peek at what it might be like as the arms of a robot caress you into your final slumber. As the vital signs tail off barely minutes after meeting, the nameless Charon’s parting words to the dying human are chillier because of their artificial warmth: “Goodbye, my friend”.

The work is part of this year’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, with its subtitle Artificial Life: The other I plugging into the present obsession with AI.

The documentation for Chen’s installation sits uncomfortably amid remote-controlled dildos and sassy sex robots in the Artificial Intimacy section of the festival’s labyrinthine Post City location – one of 12 sites hosting this far-flung show. Amid these cruder interpretations of, or tools for, artificial intimacy, Chen’s work touches on the theme that runs through the smorgasbord of digital exhibits: the search for our own humanity.

Surprisingly, alongside the almost obligatory dancing robots and automated sound installations, are tender artworks exploring that most fundamental of emotions – love. Whereas Chen’s work shows us, by its absence, the love that soothes when shuffling off this mortal coil, the allows you to kiss anyone you video-call, realistically, via a piece of sensitive oval rubber. This comes complete with pressure sensors and actuators, placed where the mouth would be on both phones.

Robotic love

The experiment from Christiane Miethge and Nils Otte, on the other hand, takes us through the journey of a female protagonist into a more digital being. One part of her journey involves exploring a relationship with a female sex robot. Captured in a short film, there are hints that the robotic nature of the exploration may be an easier route for our protagonist than if she were encountering a real-life woman in the same way.

Why? The answer may lie in some of the festival’s other installations. In a darkened room, red-lit piles of what looks like rubbish squeak, inviting inspection. Getting closer, the ill-defined shapes jerk into Wall-E-style life. These robots of , a work by Katsuki Nogami and Taiki Watai, are slaves to human action, mimicking the excitement of whoever triggers them. Perched atop shopping trolleys and air-conditioning units, the cuteness of the robots’ movements is underscored by their dystopian conditions.

It’s the positioning of this work with one a few doors down that really brings the point home. Along the corridor is a white room in which stark lighting illuminates a plinth crowned by a dog-fur outfit, including a hood made of the skinned, eyeless face of a nameless hound.

This macabre work – cumbersomely titled – was fashioned by artist Berenice Olmedo Peña from the corpses of stray dogs killed on the roads of Mexico.

Peña’s art turns our most familiar companion species into a commodity, thereby shining a light on our responsibility for domesticating a species only to abandon and abuse individuals. But more than this, she questions our humanity in the treatment of any “other” over which we have responsibility – be that a dog, a robot slave, or Homo Digitalis‘s sex robot.

Multisensory experience

This bleak face of humanity is offset by Maja Smrekar’s project, which won Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica award for hybrid art. This thoughtful, multisensory work comes from Smrekar’s lifelong relationship with dogs. She uses the tools of biotechnology to explore the chemical and biological aspects of the emotional connection between herself and her canine companions.

Alongside much of the scientific paraphernalia, a huge, fur-lined horn opens at head height. The recycled wolf fur she uses hides a respirator that exudes perfumed serotonin extracted from both artist and dog – a chemical expression of their shared pleasure in each other, the product of thousands of years of co-evolution.

Treading the thin line between bleak and cute, Japanese musician Etsuko Yakushimaru’s explores our  ongoing efforts to use DNA as a data storage method. This is a double-edged work: there is a possibility that the host bacteria may be able to “evolve” and change Yakushimaru’s bewitchingly catchy J-pop work, but at the same time there is a darker undertone about using living things for our own ends.

Another hot topic – particularly after this year’s raised awareness of the rise of “fake” – is directly addressed by one of the festival’s academic AI projects. by Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steven Seitz and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman relies on neural networks to create video of the former US president to match audio of his speeches.

Other installations focus on machine learning for image matching. Many act as exposés of the tools, but by Jake Elwes pushes this further. Elwes creates a conversation between a text-only and image-only AI, constantly iterating over interpretations of each other but never quite hitting the mark.

His work is as effective at shining a light on what’s missing in AI as Chen’s artificial carer.

And so, thanks to Ars Electronica, perhaps we can finally see that what’s missing from Artificial Life: The other I is ourselves.

ran in Linz, Austria, from 7-11 September