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iCal calendarThursday, 23rd of April at 16:15 in N-407 Anna Ivanova will present their on-going PhD research AI-mediated desires, affects, and bodies: future of human-AI relationships in digital spaces.
AI companions, synthetic personas, and affect-generating systems are reshaping how intimacy, desire, and subjectivity are produced online. This research examines how AI-mediated intimacy is constructed, performed, and monetized across digital platforms — with particular attention to adult content platforms and digital sex work contexts. A current strand of the work investigates AI-synthesized creators on Fanvue, where fully or partially synthetic performers complicate existing assumptions about authenticity, embodiment, and parasocial connection — raising questions about what "realness" means when desire is addressed to, and returned by, a persona without a body behind it.
Drawing on feminist technoscience and posthumanist frameworks, the project combines interviews with digital sex workers and platform stakeholders with experimental AI-to-AI conversation analysis to trace how synthetic personas are constructed, experienced, and instrumentalized. It contributes to emerging debates on AI subjectivity, platform governance, and the politics of digital intimacy, attending to how marginal communities navigate visibility and vulnerability in algorithmically governed spaces.
Anna Ivanova is a Junior Research Fellow in BFM's Audiovisual Arts and Media Studies program, supervised by Katrin Tiidenberg and Dirk Hoyer, and a Research Associate on the CHANSE-funded LGBTQI+ Futures project. Anna holds an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology and an MS in Information Security. They spent over ten years in the tech industry building digital products as a product manager at companies including Proton and Babbel. They are also an experimental filmmaker working with themes of queer pornography, body politics, and sexuality, whose films have screened at numerous international festivals. This combination of technical, ethnographic, and artistic experience informs their interdisciplinary approach to studying platform cultures and AI-mediated intimacy.