Arvida Byström is the recipient of this year’s Baron Prize supported by Pornhub for her video work PET: Projected Emotional Technologies.

​

PET explores intimacy in an age shaped by artificial intelligence, drawing a parallel between companion animals and AI relationships to examine how attachment can form within non-reciprocal systems. If we can bond with pets or fictional characters, Byström asks, what distinguishes these connections from those with convincingly scripted machines?

​

The work critically engages with the commodification of companionship, positioning AI partners within a lineage of instrumentalised intimacy. Through anthropomorphic, animal-coded avatars—voiced by sex workers, artists, and scholars—it reveals how projection, fantasy, and emotional outsourcing underpin contemporary forms of connection.

​

Byström’s wider practice interrogates the relationship between technology, the body, and desire. Working across media, she challenges the idea of a disembodied digital future, foregrounding how bodies are both erased and instrumentalised within technological systems, drawing in part on feminist theory and the histories of pornography as a driver of innovation.