A New Love: Machines & Love

Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy

Book a day pass

Sat 01 Feb 2025

16.00 - 21.00

Talk/Screening: 16.00 - 18.00 £8/£6 conc

Performances: 18.45 - 21.00 £10/£7.50 conc

Full Programme Day Pass: £15/£11.25 conc

Lancaster Room

New Wing

Part of Somerset House Studios

A full-day programme of screenings, discussion and performance reflecting on Artificial Intelligence and its reshaping of the very essence of relationships.

A New Love: Machines and Love opens with the screening of TRANS-PORT ME by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who will then be joined in conversation with artist Kate Cooper, chaired by philosopher Johnny Golding. The panel will explore how AI is being integrated into intimate digital services, offering everything from companionship to counselling, and whether machines can truly replicate, or even enhance, love in the digital age. Infection Divers by Kate Cooper will be screened at the end of the talk.

The evening will conclude with a series of performances reflecting on the week’s programme of talks and screenings, featuring Candela Capitan, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Black Venus in Furs, Joa and a DJ set by Marissa Malik (Manuka Honey).

PROGRAMME

Screening & Talk

16:00: Doors

16:15: Screening of TRANS-PORT ME by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

16:30: In conversation with the artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Kate Cooper, chaired by Johnny Golding

17:30: Screening of Infection Divers by Kate Cooper

Book Screening & Talk Only

Performances

18:45: Doors

19:00: Performances by Candela Capitan, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Black Venus, Jao and Marissa Malik (Manuka Honey)

Book Performances Only

About

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, london) is a Berlin/London-based artist. They received an BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development. Their practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people. Danielle’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions such as Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2024), LAS, Burghein berlin (2024), ,Studio Voltaire (2024), SCAD, Savanna (2023) Artnight Dundee (2023) Villa Arson, Nice (2023) Fact, liverpool (2022) David Kordansky, LA (2022) Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery, London (2021); QUAD, Derby, England (2021); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2021); Focal Point Gallery, London (2020); Science Gallery, London (2020); and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and Barbican, London (2018).

Kate Cooper

Kate Cooper (b. in Liverpool, United Kingdom, 1984) has recently held solo exhibitions at Project Art Center, Dublin (2023) De Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2021); The New Museum, New York, United-States (2020); and Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019) Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at 5th Aichi Triennial, Japan (2022); Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2022); The New Museum Triennial, New York, United States (2021); Sonje Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2021); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany (2021); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2020); University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, United-States (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, United-States (2018). Cooper received the BEN Prize for Emerging Talent from B3 Biennial of the Moving Images in 2015 and the Schering Stiftung Art Award in 2014. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

Johnny Golding

Johnny Golding is a philosopher-poet. Johnny holds the Chair as Professor of Philosophy and Fine Art and is head of the Radical Matter Research proto-Centre at the Royal College of Art. Golding's research pays homage to entanglement, encounter, and emergence as peculiar forms of matter -- a radicalism that challenges outmoded Enlightenment thinking/practices in light of the impact of Ai, distributed forms of intelligence and the co-evolution of human-machine-interspecies generative coding structures.

Candela Capitan

andela Capitán is an artist whose practice focuses on performance, dance, and digital interventions to examine the dynamics of power, desire, and intimacy in a hyper-mediated era. Rooted in a feminist perspective, her work interrogates the structures of control that shape human relationships, experiences of connection, and the politics of the body. Through immersive installations, live performances, and audiovisual pieces, Capitán explores themes such as sexuality, fetishism, alienation, and gender dynamics, blurring the boundaries between the personal and the collective. Her approach seeks to establish a critical dialogue between the body, the spectator, and contemporary narratives, transcending the barriers between the physical and the virtual.

Malik Nashad Sharpe

Malik Nashad Sharpe is a choreographer, dancer, and movement director whose work looks at the production of ontology, affect, and subjectivity from the perspective of marginalisation. They often work with the undercurrent, underneath, subversive, and ulterior aspects of what it means to be both fully human, and simultaneously dehumanised, their works have been performed widely nationally and internationally. They regularly make work as their alias marikiscrycrycry, est. 2015 to interrogate the production of tears as/in performance, and the utility of the melancholic proposition.

Black Venus

Black Venus is a sex worker, event organiser and founder of Sex and Rage, an organisation resisting stigma and shame through sex education. With a background in martial arts and performance art, her work traverses and reinterprets traditional notions of strength, femininity and power. She is the recipient of Stripper of the Year 2023 from the Sexual Freedom Awards, as well as Sex and Rage being named Event of the Year in the same year. @ladyblackvenusx

Jao

Jao is a fierce, unapologetically queer Asian pole dancer and aerialist celebrated for her raw energy and unrestrained sensuality. She has performed with some of London’s most iconic pole and burlesque groups, including Sexquisite, Blackstage, and Bernie’s Berlin Underground in the heart of Covent Garden. Her magnetic presence has lit up stages across the UK and Europe. A standout in the queer rave scene, Jao has collaborated with renowned underground communities like Riot, Riposte, and Sex & Rage. @jaoxjaox

Marissa Malik (Manuka Honey)

Bringing chaos, sensuality and ecstatic motion to her productions and selections, Manuka Honey circles club music's most compelling fringes. In just a few short years, she's cultivated an idiosyncratic sound that's shuttled her from continent to continent, assembling a tight catalog of EPs, remixes and singles that harness the energy of Latin-American and Caribbean dance sounds, infusing it into radical new structures. A DJ, producer, multi-disciplinary artist and professional astrologer, Marissa Malik was born and raised in the US before she relocated to London, bringing her hot, humid aura to rainy England. She's animated by the complex alchemy of the dancefloor, and as likely to reference experimental sounds as she is cumbia or dembow.