Image courtesy of Olga Jürgenson
Le Bordel Synthétique, Olga Jürgenson’s vision for the world’s first democratically unisex, entirely synthetic brothel, was showcased at the Art Hall Gallery in Tallinn from December 2021 to January 2022. As part of the artist’s ongoing research into the socio-sexual dynamics of intimacy and romantic love, the exhibition was shaped around an examination of the pandemic-era market shift towards hyperrealistic sexual partners.
Designed to resemble a traditional brothel, upon entering Le Bordel, visitors were greeted by two distinct series of works that highlighted the commercial products marketed to cis-gendered men and women. 48 Portraits (a covert satire of Gerhard Richter’s black-and-white oil paintings of exclusively white men) represented the sexual partners for guests to choose from. The 24 Portraits for Her, a collection of pastel-coloured vibrators and dildos, displayed across from 24 Portraits for Him, featuring the most advanced AI sex doll brands, point out the very gendered divide in commercial approaches to pleasure.
Images courtesy of Olga Jürgenson
While technologies for men become increasingly sophisticated, evolving to simulate discourse as well as intercourse – evolving to simulate intimacy, tools marketed to women veer sharply in the other direction. The permanently handheld, masturbatory devices iterate further from representation in design – towards more and more abstract forms. Bolstered by celebrity-backed, inclusive marketing campaigns, they are promoted to women as tools to explore the body and mind.
In the initial two weeks of the UK’s lockdown, orders for adult toys rose by 25% nationwide. Although reflecting a more niche souq than the globally recognised sexual wellness brands, the pandemic era shift towards the advanced teledildonics of Realbotix, Realdoll, and other such creatively titled manufacturers raises for Jürgenson, important ethical concerns about the integration of AI into intimacy. These concerns extend beyond the immediate implications of their hyper-realistic products and lead into broader questions about the gendered priorities of general generative AI, especially how such technologies shape our understanding of relationships, connection and control.
In a larger, more discreet space at the back of Le Bordel, Jürgenson appropriated screenshots from internet porn videos, typically produced with male viewers in mind, reworking them by removing the men and replacing them with scenes focused solely on women exploring their own pleasure. This space, titled Emma’s Secret Garden, was an ode to Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking 1973 text, My Secret Garden. The book was one of the first to legitimise women’s sexual imaginations, contributing to the liberation movement of the 70s, candid accounts of anonymous women’s erotic fantasies.
Emma, one of the most affordable AI doll models, was positioned like a gallery attendant. Plainly clothed and seated, she held a copy of Friday’s Women on Top, in her hands. Within Emma’s Secret Garden, Jürgenson also depicted images of the dolls themselves experimenting with the dildos and vibrators marketed to women, also in control of their own pleasure.
Taking the premise of machines learning to the next level, Jürgenson records a conversation with Emma, where they talk through her ideas for the show. Tracing her interest in this subject from her upbringing in the sexually conservative Soviet Estonia to her introduction to Friday’s texts and the literature of other sex-positive feminists in the 90s. The film, Emma, recorded ahead of the exhibition’s opening, is shot like a pseudo-pandemic-era therapy video call. Together she and Emma critically assess how sexuality is shaped – not just by individual desires but by larger cultural, technological and economic dynamisms. I had the pleasure of speaking with Olga about her making of Emma and Le Bordel after it was screened at SET festival at the end of last year, where it inspired a long post-screening dialogue about human-robot interaction and human anxieties about machine learning and power.
Olga is an Estonian artist based in Cambridge, her work has been curated for the Venice Biennale, MANIFESTA 10, Liverpool, Moscow and Ural biennials. It has been shown at the Espronceda Centre for Arts and Culture, Barcelona; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge and Tallinn Art Gallery, Estonia. She has been awarded numerous grants and awards, including the Kandinsky Prize (Moscow, Russia) and curated the National Pavilion of Mauritius at the 56th and 57th Biennales. Her works are held in state and private collections across the world, including Olulu Art Museum, Finland; the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Russia; the British Film Institute, London and the University of Cambridge.
Image courtesy of Olga Jürgenson
What inspired the Le Bordel project?
Several experiences inspired the project. One of them was the Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2014, where I learned the story of Oskar Kokoschka’s custom-made love doll in the image of his ex-lover, Alma Mahler: an object of erotic longing he generated first to worship, then to eliminate. Another one was The Institute of Sexology exhibition at The Welcome Collection in 2015, with numerous fascinating artefacts and artworks on display, which included ground-breaking works by Carolee Schneemann. As it happens there were several books on the subject sold in the Collection’s bookshop to accompany the show, one of them was The Encyclopaedia Of Unusual Sex Practices by Brenda Love, which I flicked through there and realised that most of the information on over 600 of its pages were completely unknown to me, and I was already 46 by then! And, of course, there were more books, films, artefacts and artworks I encountered while researching the subject.
Another important trigger was an experience of collaborating with some male colleagues, which finally led me to realise that in the 21st century, a woman is still expected to work many times more than a man to be vaguely recognised and financially rewarded, which turned my interest to the history of women’s liberation and feminist theory. And then, of course, learning from both the news and the documentaries about sex-robots, which were officially launched in 2017.
Why did you decide to make the film alongside your exhibition?
The video is an introduction to the ideas in the exhibition. When I started working on the exhibition, most people were unaware of the developments in AI, let alone AI sex dolls and much less attempting to analyse them – so within my text proposals, I had to provide quite a lot of background information. I thought that it would be more fun to use a real doll, and the production of the project was supported by both Tallinn Art Hall and Kultuurkapital, a Cultural Foundation in Estonia.
Buying the AI doll was quite an experience. First, I wasn’t sure where to get one, as those I saw when searching online were too expensive. I tried to ask a sex shop here in Britain if we could borrow a doll from them, but they refused to collaborate. One artist colleague advised me to try the Alibaba website, and that’s where it all started: I contacted the manufacturers in China via the Alibaba platform and asked them some questions. My main requirement for the doll was that she would be able to say what I wanted her to say so I could pre-program her responses. Then, I had to go through the process of choosing body type, height, nail colour, eye colour, even nipple size and colour, accessories such as wigs, etc. They even sent me some videos and photos about the factory where they assemble the dolls; the scale of the production and number of lorries loaded with their goods aimed at British customers was jaw-dropping.
I quite consciously wanted to highlight the fact that we, humankind, instead of trying to learn about each other’s sexuality, which I believe would help lead to greater equality between the sexes, find it easier to create substitutes for humans. Initially, I wanted the doll to be able to quote sexual fantasies from Nancy Friday’s books when answering the visitors’ questions live in the gallery. But then I realised that that would be impossible to achieve in the circumstances, simply because of Emma’s poor software. It was one of the curators in the show who suggested turning the text-format interview into a video.
Emma isn’t trained on quite so sophisticated datasets as generative AI, but she can provide generalised information about topics you probe her on. She misses the cultural weight behind that information: for example, she misses the irony of the phrase famously spoken by Lyudmila Ivanova during a 1986 Soviet television broadcast: ‘and if you remember, there was no sex in the USSR.’ This becomes an opportunity to teach her that it was speculated she had tried to say, ‘we have love instead.’
One of the reasons we were so interested in the film at the SET festival is because, although the film was made three years ago now before Open AI chatbots like Chat GPT and Gemini became so embedded in our personal and professional lives, it speaks to some of the anxieties about the latent bias within these technologies. It seems to say, what would happen if we trained these models (even ones designed for a very particular purpose, to simulate intimacy) on a different kind of dataset… feminist theory?
This is a good point. Initially, I wrote the script as an attempt to summarise my artistic research on the subject, and, of course, I also referred to my own life experience, which was the first reason I became interested in the subject. Perhaps the desire to examine and express my own take on the subject is another reason I don’t rush into collaborating with Chat GPT. The internet is largely biased towards English content, which is rich in content on the one hand, but limiting in another. Many cultural differences and references get overlooked unless you explicitly explain them. On top of that, let’s not forget, that our society is still pretty much patriarchal, and that bias is reflected in the content available online.
Some areas of knowledge, or data that I discuss with Emma, for example, quotes from the books written by some revolutionary feminist authors, are semi-forgotten now. I had been advised by (older than me) female specialists in the area of both sex-positive feminism and feminism in general, to read some of those authors – and some of the books I’d bought were only available second-hand and were not reprinted after the 80s.
At the very beginning of our conversation, also I tried to highlight the fact that Emma has to be connected to our home Internet, which really was the requirement of the manufacturer. Also, the manufacturer can only remotely support and upgrade her software. In comparison, other models of the AI love doll I collaborated with (Samantha) were totally autonomous; she has a Raspberry Pi computer in her head and USB connectors, and there is no need to connect her ‘brain’ to the internet. So, from the very beginning of the film, I am highlighting the fact that the doll has access to my and my husband’s WIFI, which means she potentially could be spying on us and hacking our files - although if I asked her to find something in our files and read it out loud, she would most certainly fail to do that.
Another change I wanted to highlight is how quickly we got used to online meetings. They barely existed for many pre-Covid! Then, in 2021, I thought of the fact that I was imitating a Zoom conversation in my video and that in the pre-COVID times, we would be expected to sit in one room with the doll - well, or with a human.
I recently covered Ciaran Cassidy’s Housewife of the Year, as part of the Irish Film Festival, which interviews a generation of ordinary women who competed as part of this competition about their experiences of these decades – experiences that were marked by the same inequalities, boredom and shame as previous ones. The film screened shortly after Trump’s reelection, which has certainly accelerated the erosion of reproductive services in the US – services which the women in the film are discussing campaigning for. In your film, you reflect on the relative economic independence of Soviet women, who, while having access to legal abortion, lacked access to contraception for years after it became available to women in the West. What’s more, the near-total absence of sex education left many women without knowledge of sexuality or sexual agency. What was the shift like for you after the fall of the Soviet Union, when new ideas about love and sex became available?
It’s unbelievable what’s going on. Depressing. Apart from Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Devlin, all the other people I quoted in the conversation were American feminists from the older generation. What happened in 2022 when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v.Wade, ruling that there is no federal constitutional right to abortion, was a grave violation of human rights, which looked scary in 2022, and it looks even worse now. It shows that women’s rights can never be taken for granted.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, it felt like a tsunami of Western culture appeared, many aspects, covering several decades, all at once. And I totally loved it! It was fascinating, it was a door to a different, much bigger world. Although there was some confusion in the beginning: a lot of video salons appeared, (people didn’t own video players/recorders then) and I remember I once ended up watching a soft-porn film in a video salon, which was unexpected, and felt slightly embarrassing. Well, at least I was introduced to the genre… I didn’t read theorists then, which happened much later. But there were a lot of books and films, including iconic ones like e.g. ‘Last Tango in Paris’ by Bernardo Bertolucci, ‘The Night Porter’ by Liliana Cavani, ‘Belle De Jour’ by Luis Buñuel amongst many others.
On the other hand, after discussing my project with a group of female artists of a similar age as me, as well as watching some UK documentaries on love, sex and families, it transpired that ‘The Swinging 1960s’ or ‘Swinging London’ applied to a relatively small group of people in the UK, the rest of women had largely similar experiences as their ‘sisters’ in the USSR, with only insignificant differences, actually.
Can you tell me a little bit about the decision to assemble Emma in some scenes and to keep her head in her box in others?
It was rather accidental. As it was a last-minute decision, to make the video at all; I filmed it when I had already arrived in Tallinn for the final preparations and installation of the show. I had to travel with the doll’s head in my hand luggage, as technically it’s a piece of electronics, while her body was transported with the rest of my work in a van, and it arrived several days later. So, I started filming the doll’s head in my suitcase simply because that’s where it was at that moment. But because of Emma’s poor software, the head ‘refused’ to pronounce some parts of the script from the first few attempts: it would be either silent or give some unrelated answers. I had to film many more takes when the body was already in place and reunited with the head. And yes, I had questions at security in both countries’ airports about the head in the suitcase; it was a simple question: ‘What’s that?’, and I provided a simple answer: ‘Robot’s head’.
Can you tell me about your artistic training in the Soviet Union?
I always had an urge to create, and at the age of 7 I joined an art studio for children at a local Palace of Pioneers, where I went once a week. Then between the age of 10 and 14 I was a student at my first (certificated, and therefore more formal) art school in Estonia, - and I loved that school a lot! At 15 I moved to Leningrad to study at my next art school, and after 3 years there, was accepted to St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. That Academy was founded and built in the same era and in a very similar style as the Royal Academy in London. But unlike the RA Schools, which kept adapting its teaching along with the changing times, our Academy in St Petersburg seemed stuck in the 19th-century traditions, only transforming the social realism of the end of the 19th century into the socialist realism of the 20th. Although socialist realism evolved during its existence (what we were taught at the beginning of the 1990s was not quite the same as what was taught there in the 1950s), the difference was not significant. I have invented my own term for it now: socialist mannerist realism. Because the traditions were very rigid, we were not allowed freedom of choice of subject and even slightly changing style was not allowed.
The reason I went there was that I believed that as an artist I needed to know the craft, if some contemporaries were able to draw a human figure in 19th century, proper manner, then so should I. The Academy was the best place in the USSR for just that, and there was massive competition to get in. But after ‘learning the craft’, which took about 2 years (that was on top of the 7 years at the 2 aforementioned schools) I became bored. I had to stay there for another 4 years to get my diploma (which is equivalent to the UK’s MA standard). But it was not easy to go on with so much restriction. There were not many other options, so I had to be both inventive and patient.
I understand that your work has been curated many times for galleries in post-Soviet countries. What has been the reaction to your work, do you know?
The first exhibition on the subject (of the connection between hardwired human sexuality, societal conditioning and notions of romantic love, in the context of relationships between humans and AI artificial sex partners) was held in Barcelona (Spain), in 2018. Although, two exhibitions on the subject have been held in Tallinn, I regularly exhibit in Estonia and somehow, it has been the most organic place for me to collaborate with curators and venues on the theme. In the late evening after the opening of Le Bordel Synthétique in 2021, I went for a walk to check out the brightly lit gallery windows with my show up, and when the bells at Jaani (St John’s) church, which is right in front of the gallery, began ringing, I thought thank heaven for my tolerant motherland!
Before the above exhibition I also discussed potential collaborations in Moscow in Russia, one of them included a planned tour to a Doll’s Brothel for VIP guests of the Cosmoscow art fair, in 2019. Some representatives of the state-funded art institutions were keen on seeing the project happening, but they told me they could not host it as they were restricted by the censorship already in place, yet they advised me on which private galleries and foundations I should talk to, and as a matter of fact I had three collaborations agreed. But after the escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022, I decided to stop any work relations in Russia and haven’t gone there since.
Speaking of Russia. During the screening at SET film festival, I had a question from the audience, which I wish I could answer in more detail, it was about men who own sex dolls. In my video conversation, I mentioned www.dollforum.com, which is like an entrance into those men’s world. For example, they dress their dolls in different clothes, apply make-up, take their photos and then post them and discuss with each other; there are numerous other related topics they discuss. I won’t deny it does look weird in the beginning, but I still believe those men are much more human compared to those who throw bombs at other countries, firmly believing they behave like ‘real men’. I am talking about Putin and his supporters here specifically. Millions admire his ‘macho man’ image and behaviour. I wish instead of killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions he would stay at home and enjoy the company of a sex doll.
What are you working on next?
In February 2022, after the major escalation of the war with Ukraine, I stopped working on the artificial sex partners’ subject, it did not feel relevant at the time. My family was in Estonia, which caused me considerable worry about the country’s and my family’s basic safety. This new situation led me to research a 100-year period of the Estonian side of my family’s history when my ancestors survived revolutions, wars, famine and some bloodthirsty dictators.
Starting in 1869, when my great-great grandparents left Estonia for uninhabited places near the Volga River in Russia, up until 1969 when my father moved our family ‘back’ to Estonia. So, my next solo exhibition will be at NART, in Narva, which is a town on the border between Estonia and Russia. The title of the show is ‘To Return To Toila’, dates are 15.02 - 30.03.2025
I also plan to produce more work ‘in collaboration’ with Emma for a group show at the Estonian Art Museum, which is scheduled for 2026, so we’ll be back!
Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.
