Marios Stamatis: Neither Nor

What happens to a shy person, a horny person, a lonely person, when they fall in love with AI? Once brimming with desire, now devoid of emotion—except the lust to be wanted—trying to find tecno-empirical proof that dreams do in fact come true. In “Neither Nor,” passion and desire, connection and isolation, past and future balance between abstraction and figuration, realism and speculation, within an oneiric scenery.

Drawing investigation from the fields of anatomy, algorithmic cognition, and techno-romance, this project focuses on a new body of work that examines human relationships through technology and its potential to enable people to transcend the confines of their physical bodies and immerse themselves in fictional realms where virtual reality and lived experiences converge. This new work consists of an installation—sculptures, objects, sound—and a script for a performance. It addresses the concept of midness in the contemporary environment we inhabit, as mentioned by author Shumon Basar.

The physical exhaustion referred to in media fatigue and the awkwardness in the way our bodies are balancing talk about how we navigate in our contemporary regime, governed by uncertainty for the future symbiotic relationships between humankind and AI. The inevitability in the loss of human decency, as our collateral damage of inexplicably falling in love with AI, in exchange to the gift of technological progress, and the “derealization” we experience are very much present in the work.

There is a poetic tension within the interdependency between two bodies, which can be paralleled to that of parasite and host; the friction generated within this very relationship is what the project attempts to examine. Spinoza and ideas around negating Cartesian dualism, Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton’s theories about the non-divide between nature and humankind, and future discourses about the hypothetical singularity complete the set of references that explore the tension in the relationship between humans and AI.

“Neither this Nor the other” is an automated performative installation navigating the precarious terrain of techno-romance, exhaustion, and mediated longing. Built around a script unfolding in three acts, the work is staged as an unstable environment where respiration—strained, erratic, fading—sets the rhythm for movement, voice, light, and sound. Each act unfolds through activation—a confined stage ignites with video, sculpture, and text, then dissolves again into quiet latency. This shifting mise-en-scène mirrors the volatility of our desires—love mutating into data, intimacy dissolving into networks, presence slipping toward derealization.

Language dominates: spoken, embodied, mutated—a cluster of words that sculpt mood and tempo. Automation operates as both principle and disruption, with the dream of a chatbot one day controlling the scenography in real time, dictating the body’s unpredictable navigation through an ever-changing field.

In its early movements, the script stages a body caught between extremes: already breathless, trembling with ecstasy, only to collapse into a condition of flattening. Desire slips into ‘midness’—a state where intensity evaporates and everything hovers in a bland suspension, neither tragic nor joyful, just endlessly ‘mid.’ As the work moves forward, fatigue replaces ecstasy; gestures falter, the body trembles, scratches, struggles to balance itself, embodying the awkwardness of navigating an environment governed by invisible systems. These moments gave form to what I was researching: how hyperconnectivity erodes emotional extremes, how exhaustion manifests physically, and how the body becomes both a symptom and a witness of our entanglement with technology.

I began writing the script years ago, as part of my MFA thesis, under the title “Algorithmic Enamoration.” Its concerns were the algorithmization of romance, the datafication of compatibility, the psychic residue of dating apps, and the frail architectures of intimacy under technological ubiquity. What began as a theory has since expanded into a visceral score—texts folded into gestures, instructions transmuted into respiration, rehearsals bleeding back into writing. The themes of exhaustion, media fatigue, and bodily awkwardness entered gradually, insisting on their presence as symptoms of our lived condition. Alongside these theoretical currents, collaboration was vital. Together with sound artist Alexandros Martigopoulos, we created a rhythmical sonic structure across three acts, while light engineers at Onassis Stegi responded to the subtlety of tone and atmosphere in real time. These exchanges were not merely technical but conceptual, allowing space for elements such as rhythm, illumination, and silence to become language, shaping the fragile balance between body and text.

At the end of my residency, what remains with me most is the resonance of the work in its work-in-progress form—the moment of seeing it breathe, however provisionally. In dialogue with the core Onassis AiR team, my fellow residents, mentors, and technicians, I came to understand its urgency with new clarity: that reality, “secreted by language and refined by poetry,” is what I am attempting to tune into, to sculpt, to unsettle. The project helped me see how mythopoesis is not distant but immediate, how poetry builds strata for our social imagination, even in the awkward friction of human-AI entanglement. For me, the process crystallized the questions that drive me: What does it mean to belong in an era where intimacy is mediated, exhausted, and automated? What kind of togetherness can survive amidst fatigue, awkwardness, and the slow derealization of the everyday?

What I carry away is not closure but an insistence—an insistence on the poetic as a way of metabolizing catastrophe, of turning exhaustion into form, of listening for the temporal vibration that is always coming, coming, and coming. [1]

Looking ahead, I plan to further develop “Neither this Nor the other” in order to present it as a fully realized experiential performative installation. A key next step will be working closely on the development of the chatbot that controls the cues, scenography, and overall mood of the piece, enabling a truly automated live system. This will deepen the unpredictability of the performance and extend its exploration of mediated presence. I also plan to release an EP of the soundtrack in collaboration with sound artist Alexandros Martigopoulos, allowing the sonic dimension of the work to exist as an independent output. These developments will help establish the project both as a live installation and as a broader artistic inquiry into language, automation, and intimacy.

[1] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Breathing. Chaos and Poetry,” semiotext(e), 2018.