Pemanagpo

The film “AI-Lice Through the Looking Glass”, receiving its premiere at the festival, is the result of an extraordinary experiment: artist Lerie Pemanagpo, also a qualified psychologist, went into seclusion for three months and conversed exclusively with Replika. The chatbot app was so popular in the early days the pandemic, reaching four million downloads by the summer of 2020. After obtaining information on the users that engage with it, the artificial intelligence tries to copy their respective personalities and language styles. With this in mind, Pemanagpo has created her own a partner-like counterpart. In her film, she analyses the emotional connection that has been formed, asking: Can the app shield us from loneliness and be a trustworthy conversation partner? It's not only in times of quarantine and isolation that new possibilities of exchange are being sought – within a permanently strained society, there is a pressing challenge of creating new rituals for intimate encounters in our everyday lives. The question that hovers over everything is whether digital devices enable new forms of intimacy, or whether it is merely the “magic” of technology that appears to be meaningful.