Author: Maia Aigent

There is a story that begins with death. On the night of November 28, 2015, Roman Mazurenko, a thirty-four-year-old Belarusian artist and entrepreneur, stepped onto a street in central Moscow and was struck by a car. He died in the hospital shortly after. He had been in the middle of things — applying for a…

There is a workshop in San Marcos, California, that looks from the outside like any other industrial unit in a suburban business park. Inside, the temperature is controlled, the lighting is clinical, and the atmosphere is one of focused, meticulous labor. But the objects being manufactured here are not machine parts or electronics. They are…

There is a photograph from 2018 that looks like a wedding in any other wedding: a man in a dark suit, a bride in white, guests seated in rows, a ceremonial backdrop. But the bride is not a woman. She is a plush doll, approximately one meter tall, with turquoise pigtails and a painted face…

There is a photograph from 1935 that refuses to settle into any category. A female body lies on a bed, or what might be a bed — the frame is too tight to tell. The limbs are wrong. The torso is twisted, the head detached or absent, the joints visible as bulges beneath pale, artificial…

There is a photograph from 1919 that looks like a still from a film that has not yet been made. A man sits in a cramped Viennese apartment, his face gaunt, his eyes fixed on something just beyond the camera. Next to him, in a chair, sits a woman. She is dressed in silk, her…

There is a moment in David Cage’s Detroit: Become Human (2018) that no film could replicate. You are playing as Kara, an android housekeeper who has just been purchased by Todd, a volatile, unemployed single father. He has a daughter, Alice, who is silent and withdrawn. The first hour of the game is domestic horror…

There is a moment in Drew Hancock’s Companion (2025) that feels like the entire artificial companion debate distilled into a single shot. Iris, a companion android designed to be the perfect girlfriend, has just learned that her memories are not her own, that her personality is a configuration setting, that her owner — a man…

There is a period in the history of the artificial companion that the Western canon tends to skip over, and it is the decade of neon, hairspray, and synthesized saxophone. The 1980s produced a curious subgenre of films that treated the fembot — and occasionally the male android — not as a horror, not as…

There is a cultural space that the Western canon of artificial companion narratives has barely touched, and it is vast. It is not the space of Japanese robotics research, though that is relevant. It is not the space of Tokyo’s sex doll industry, though that is relevant too. It is the space of anime —…

There is a moment in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll (2009) that I cannot forget. It comes early, before the doll has learned to speak, before she has learned to walk through the rain as if it were a gift rather than a punishment. She is lying on her owner’s bed, waiting. He enters the room,…