During this performative lecture on artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness and artificial desire, the speaker will be at the same time connected to a robot, which traces circles on a piece of paper, sensing the speaker’s excitement, anxiety or any physical response, and expresses them as data through deviations from the perfect circle. The final question of this exploration is: can a robot become a desiring body?

Bauman’s concept of liquidity is examined within Jungian, post-Jungian and relational psychoanalysis and it is shown that, following Jung, it is crucial to learn the art of meditation (“to envisage new possibilities. To imagine new ways of consideration” (Shamdasani, 2013). Otherwise, as suggested by Bauman, we will continually move from one life/identity to another in a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction, of killing time.

In this event, four visual artists that work with video and four musicians will show their collaborative works. The collaborations offer a contemporary version of a practice common in cinema’s pre-sound era, in which silent video’s that often refer to subconscious undercurrents are paired with live music. The music offers an accompaniment to the visuals in which atmosphere, movement and material are contrasted and amplified.

Sartre, as a child of his century, was deeply attracted to psychoanalysis, as a great revolution of the mind which had effects in all human sciences. His attraction to psychoanalysis drove him to find his way through Freud’s craziest ideas and led him to believe that he could create a «existential psychoanalysis» without any superego or hidden mechanisms; in which the unconscious is only bad faith, and trauma the proof of the existence of a personal «fundamental project».